We will engage relevant stakeholders and rightsholder groups to share information on the project, and will elicit and incorporate their ideas into the work plan. We will build off existing relationships and invite new interested parties to a series of workshops held throughout the study region. Our team is actively involved with Federal government initiatives such as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Agricultural Climate Solutions Program (ACS) Living Labs program. The program is designed to work with end-users to accelerate the testing, adoption, dissemination, and monitoring of technologies and practices, including beneficial management practices (BMPs), that sequester carbon and/or mitigate GHG emissions. Drs. Bennett, Asselin, Bainard, Carlyle, and Zhang are involved in these co-development projects in Saskatchewan and have direct ties to GG4GHG activities. Invitations to these workshops will include representatives from our partner organizations, including those in the livestock industry (Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association, Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association, Saskatchewan Forage Seed Development Commission), the non-profit sector (Ducks Unlimited Canada, Nature Conservancy of Canada, Meewasin Valley Authority, Saskatchewan Association of Watersheds), and First Nations Groups (See IDEA for more details in these relationships). The primary foci of the workshops will be to 1) identify native plant species that are viewed as valuable to the groups, 2) elicit perceptions and barriers to native plant utilization, 3) identify which ecosystem services provided or influenced by native grasslands are of high priorities to different partners, and 4) determine barriers to managing pasture systems and restored grasslands for ecosystem services other than forage production. By involving Indigenous groups, we aim to better understand the local ways of knowing to create relationships with the land that respect local value systems, and to enhance our capacity to support community priorities on the land. We recognize that goals and perceptions may vary among user groups. The focus of this engagement is not to build consensus but to characterize the diversity of opinions and to identity potential compromises beneficial to all parties that can inform the rest of the project, with final decisions made by the Scientific Management Committee (see Section VII).

The qualitative information and insights gained from the workshops will be complemented by quantitative information from a large-scale survey of producers and an econometric analysis of land prices to better understand behavioral drivers of adoption and to estimate the changes in producer- level profits from restoring native grasslands.

We will develop a producer survey instrument to identify barriers to adoption, perceived costs, and policy acceptance of planting more native plants on pastures and for using genomic tools to assess ecosystem services and land valuation. The survey will integrate producer-supplied information on the impact of identified ecosystem services on productivity, cost of production, and production risk. The survey will also employ stated preference techniques to elicit perceived values for ecosystem services and willingness-to-accept values for adoption of identified management practices and genomic monitoring tools. The stated preference survey will be designed, tested, and administered to a large representative panel of agricultural producers (n = 500) across the three Prairie provinces—Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba—which contain most of Canada’s grasslands (17 million hectares of natural and seeded grasslands). The survey will be developed and tested based on the project team's experience and cognitive interviews with agricultural producers. The producer survey will be administered online to a panel of agricultural producers maintained by Kynetec; a quota-based sampling approach will ensure a representative sample of agricultural producers is obtained and insights are generalizable to the population. The sample size will allow us to move beyond average effects/values to study how responses differ across respondent characteristics. Understanding producer attitudes to alternative management practices and less tangible costs will help inform policy instruments assessed in Act1.4.

We will also conduct an econometric analysis of recent farmland sales transactions in the prairies to empirically estimate the costs or benefits of native grassland restoration. Land sales signal the value of the bundle of attributes of the parcel and its surrounding landscape, as perceived by buyers and sellers in the land market. We already have collected data on all farmland sales in Saskatchewan from 1998– 2020 and we will work to obtain similar farmland sales data for Alberta and Manitoba. Spatial information on ecosystem service associated data, such as pollinator abundance and diversity and carbon stocks, will be combined with other important factors affecting land values, such as soil quality and weather, to measure the internal benefits to landowners and the landscape level benefits to neighboring parcels. The hedonic price analysis will empirically demonstrate the economic implications of changes in ecosystem service levels that are relevant for producers. These datasets will be used to assess the impact of ecosystem service provision on land values, as revealed through transactions in land markets across the target landscapes.

Taken together, the stakeholder engagement, producer survey, and hedonic price analysis will inform the development of a field-level economic simulation model that can quantify producer benefits and costs of native grassland restoration and the utilization of native species in pasture.