Richard U. Ratcliff Award.

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Michael Cragg, PhD, Christine Polek, PhD, and Stephen Polasky, PhD, are the winners of the 2011 Richard U. Ratcliff Award and a $3000 honorarium for their article, "Valuing Properties with Wetland Potential," published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Appraisal Journal.

The Richard U. Ratcliff Award is presented to the best original article published in The Appraisal Journal that was written by an academic author. Articles are judged on the basis of pertinent appraisal interest, provocative thought, logical analysis, perceptive reasoning, clarity of presentation, and overall contribution to the literature of valuation. To be eligible for this award, the article must have been peer reviewed by members of The Appraisal Journal's Academic Review Panel and the academic author must be engaged in teaching at a college or university.

In "Valuing Properties with Wetland Potential," Cragg, Polek, and Polasky discuss government policies that allow for wetland destruction to be offset by developing and converting suitable land into qualifying wetlands, which can then be sold as credits to developers. Land with a highest and best use for wetland mitigation credits typically requires environmental analysis, engineering expertise, landscape design, and approval by authorities before it can be resold lot that purpose. This article offers information, examples, and suggestions for the valuation of property readily converted to qualifying wetlands, and a case study demonstrates analysis of mitigation transactions using the income capitalization and sales comparison approaches.

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Michael Cragg, PhD, is a principal at The Brattle Group, Inc. He received a PhD in finance and economics from Stanford University and a BSE from Princeton University. His research has been sponsored by a variety of foundations as well as the National Bureau of Economic Research and the National Science Foundation and has been published in journals such as the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Urban Economic, Canadian Journal of Economics, and Journal of Developmental Economics.

Christine Polek, PhD, is a consultant with the Brattle Group, Inc., and she previously was a content developer with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Polek received a PhD in economics from George Mason University and a BS in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Stephen Polasky, PhD, holds the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Ecological/Environmental Economics at the University of Minnesota with a joint appointment in the Department of Applied Economics and the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. He received a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan in 1986. Polasky was a senior staff economist for environment and resources for the President's Council of Economic Advisers 1998-1999. He is a founding fellow of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and he is a research fellow of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Stockholm, a university fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, Polasky was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on two committees for the EPA's Science Advisory Board and has served on the Committee on Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration for the U.S. Department of Interior; he currently serves on the Science Council of The Nature Conservancy. Polasky's articles have been published in journals such as Ecological Applications, Journal of Economics Perspectives, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, International Economic Review, Land Economics, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science.