Sellers are landowners and organizations that voluntarily restore and manage their land for ecological benefits—beyond what is required by existing regulations. Sellers could be farmers and foresters, but they also could include land trusts, watershed councils, or for-profit companies.

What is the role of sellers?

Sellers create the credit supply. By conserving or restoring functioning forests, river floodplains, streamside vegetation, wetlands, and other habitats, sellers maintain or increase the amount of services the ecosystem provides. This creates credits that then can be registered and sold on the market. For some rural landowners, selling in the market is a way to diversify their income and become partners in conservation.

Case study: The Hayes family

In the Northwestern corner of the Willamette Basin, on the breaking slopes of the Coast Range, three generations of the Hayes family are attempting to find a balance between economic viability and ecological sustainability. The effort, led by Pam and Peter Hayes, involves multiple pieces of property that were all intensively logged in the past. The family has sought to maintain the economical viability of the land while also restoring its ecological richness. Their efforts, however, have been hampered by an inability to properly value and profit from the natural services the land provides.

"We are testing a hypothesis that a forest grown to be ecologically complex can also be economically profitable"

The Hayes family harvests timber regularly, cutting a quarter to a half of their forest’s annual growth rate. They sell boards milled with their own solar-powered saw, and whole logs as well, both of which earn them a premium through certification by the Forest Stewardship Council. In addition to this traditional revenue stream, the Hayes family has looked into selling ecosystem services generated by their forest lands—but this has yet to happen. Peter Hayes offers three reasons for this. First, there is a lot of uncertainty in markets with multiple ways of valuing and selling ecosystem services competing with each other. Second, there is little assurance that credits are producing the benefits they intend to produce. And third, there is a lot of volatility in markets due to changing regulatory and economic conditions. Pete Hayes summarized the situation by saying he doesn’t want to "encumber the land with a long-term commitment in exchange for uncertain rewards," with these "rewards" being both financial and ecological.

A mature ecosystem marketplace in the Willamette Basin would offer the Hayes family a way of overcoming these barriers. Addressing Peter’s concerns in order, a mature market would establish a consistent, verifiable and tenable method of measuring ecological richness and the services this richness provides; it would permanently attach these services to credits in a reasonable manner and include a monitoring component that would ensure their longevity; and it would couple stable regulations with increased transparency creating greater certainty for those seeking to invest in the market.

The Hayes family understands that it is essential to get private landowners involved in conservation and that incentives will play an important role in doing so. An ecosystem marketplace is one way to deliver incentives to land owners in a way that recognizes contributions to ecological health that exceed regulatory compliance. The Hayes family’s forest land is not yet profitable; they have tended towards long-term preservation at the cost of short-term economic viability. With the help of an ecosystem marketplace, they may, as Peter Hayes states, "no longer have to choose between ecological health and profits."