About

Kailin Kroetz is an Assistant Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She is a natural resource economist and interdisciplinary sustainability scientist whose research focuses on improving the management of renewable natural resources such as fisheries, water, and wildlife habitats to better support biodiversity and sustainable food systems. Her work examines the tradeoffs that arise when balancing food production, conservation, and community well-being, using economic tools and data-driven methods to make complex decisions more transparent and effective. She collaborates closely with ecologists, policymakers, and practitioners to develop new datasets, apply quantitative models, and evaluate environmental and natural resource policies across topics including sustainable seafood, wildlife migration, invasive species management, and fisheries governance. Her goal is to inform practical, evidence-based policies that strengthen both ecosystems and the economies and communities that depend on them.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Biology
• Social Science
• Business
• Fishery
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science
• Marketing
• Ecology
• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Engineering
• Commerce

Selected publications

• Impacts of natural resource traceability programs: evidence from the United States’ seafood import monitoring program

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2026-03-25

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Economics of Designing Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation: A Call to Integrate Pre- and Post-implementation Human Threats into Planning

  Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · 2026-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Human threats to biodiversity are the impetus for establishing protected areas (PAs) to conserve biodiversity. Current international goals aim to cover 30 percent of terrestrial and marine areas with PAs by 2030. Yet, despite the importance of human behavior in driving threats to biodiversity, relatively little economic analysis informs the design of PA networks. We describe the PA network design decision as a constrained optimization problem, which can include human responses to PAs that threaten biodiversity both within PAs and across broader seascapes and landscapes. This approach differs from most of the conservation planning literature by putting human actions at the center of PA network design decisions. We argue that PA network efficiency can be improved through design frameworks that incorporate predictions of how human behavior will respond to PAs. The variety of threats to biodiversity posed by people’s actions in marine and terrestrial settings, and across country income levels, suggests the need to include the range of human responses to a fuller set of PA network design choices, beyond decisions about the siting of PAs. We discuss possible steps to link the PA network design models discussed here to empirical analysis and implementation.

  PublisherDOI

• The Fate of Imperiled Species: Lessons from 50 Years of the US Endangered Species Act

  Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics · 2025-08-27

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Looking back on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) after 50-plus years of implementation reveals a substantial influence on conservation science. The ESA catalyzed science to support listing decisions, species status assessments, a shared understanding of species’ habitats and ranges, threat assessment and recovery planning. However, rising threats to species and limited resources to support recovery have resulted in increasing numbers of imperiled species. Prioritizing investment in biodiversity management requires more interdisciplinary approaches. Emerging research is shifting from objective solution seeking to supporting complex listing decisions based on increasingly complex genetic data to nontraditional management measures like assisted migration. Conservation science has evolved to focus on scales beyond a single species, leading to both new challenges and opportunities in how the ESA can support ecosystem and landscape-scale conservation. The importance of increasingly inclusive management also presents challenges and opportunities for more integrative research to support ESA decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Multilevel Decision‐Making and Protected Area Prioritization

  Natural Resource Modeling · 2025-06-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Conservation initiatives depend on interactions among organizations and communities that have different goals. Multilevel hierarchies provide a common decision‐making structure with different actors responsible for conservation decisions over nested spatial scales. We examine consequences of hierarchical decision‐making for spatial prioritization of new protected areas. We combine insights from general theory, an algebraic example, and a numerical application, the latter motivated by federal‐to‐state grant‐giving in the western United States. Working through a decision‐making hierarchy means fewer species can be protected for a given budget than suggested by analyses that ignore the role of conservation institutions in decision‐making. This efficiency cost results from higher level decision‐makers—the federal government in our numerical application—giving up control to lower level actors—state governments in this case. Ensuring close agreement over spatial priorities between actors can limit potential losses in how much biodiversity can be protected. By reallocating funds among lower level actors, the higher level actor can mitigate remaining losses. Spatial optimization approaches that ignore the integral role of institutions in conservation, like decision‐making hierarchies, overestimate what protected area programs can achieve and risk misallocating limited conservation funds. Accounting for multilevel decision‐making reveals where building consensus among actors will be particularly important and suggests alternative strategies that conservation funders can pursue.

  PublisherDOI

• The emerging need to manage scavenged wildlife resources

  Biological Conservation · 2025-09-04

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The emerging need to manage scavenged wildlife resources

  2025-03-10

  preprintOpen access

  Scavenged wildlife products are a unique variety of common pool wildlife resources that are collected without killing or capturing the animal, and their collection is understudied and potentially underregulated relative to their conservation significance. The separability of these products from the animals that produce them complicates efforts to link their harvest to future resource availability, resulting in a lack of active management. However, these resources are gaining popularity as online markets cater to a growing global demand for niche animal products. A notable example is naturally shed antlers, collected by “shed hunters” from wild herds for both personal and commercial use. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), home to the largest migratory cervid populations in the lower 48 states, shed hunting’s growing popularity has created a potential common-pool resource dilemma. We surveyed shed hunters before and after a key policy change in Wyoming and uncovered a diverse array of recreational and commercial values for antler collection. Our results show that resource users are experiencing externalities from increased congestion and indicate strong overall support for active management, though participants differed in their preferred approaches. For the first time, we explore the social dynamics and management preferences of scavenged resource user groups and highlight important complexities related to management. Notably, we emphasize the importance of the separability of the resource from the animal, a key characteristic of scavenged resources, when considering management approaches. Specifically, approaches like seasons designed to reduce overlap of resource use and wildlife during key periods could support recreational opportunities while reducing disturbances to wildlife.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Emerging Need to Manage Scavenged Wildlife Resources

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Seafood traceability program design: Examination of the United States’ Seafood Import Monitoring Program

  AMBIO · 2024-10-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  The United States' current Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) and a potential extension are undergoing review, yet quantitative evaluation of the current program is lacking. The SIMP is a traceability program aimed at reducing imports of seafood products that are of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) origin or associated with seafood fraud. We conducted a quantitative examination of the SIMP's current scope and design by synthesizing publicly available trade data along with measures of IUU fishing and seafood mislabeling. We found prioritized shipments amounted to 33% of 2016 imported tonnage. The SIMP species groups had higher IUU scores and mislabeling rates relative to non-SIMP groups, but the difference was consistent with random prioritization suggesting potential benefits from program expansion. Furthermore, two-thirds of imported volume lacked a mislabeling rate and 5% lacked species information, underlining the urgent need for improved open-access data on globalized seafood supply chains.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Enrollment, retention, and inclusivity of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-labelling certifications

  Marine Policy · 2023-07-10 · 9 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Where, When, What, and Which? Using Characteristics of Migratory Species to Inform Conservation Policy Questions

  Review of Environmental Economics and Policy · 2023-01-01 · 18 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Although many migratory species are of conservation concern, traditional conservation policies and economic analysis rarely address the unique characteristics of migratory species, limiting their impact. After a brief description of key attributes of migratory species, this paper explores how those features alter approaches to answering critical conservation policy questions: where, when, with what tools, and which migratory species to conserve? Because migratory species make movement decisions across space and time, migratory species conservation also considers the joint question of when and where to conserve. Policy analysis that considers the spatial–temporal actions of migratory species throughout their annual habitat and incorporates the use of near real-time information is of particular importance for migratory species conservation. Regression analysis of increasingly available spatial–temporal data about species movements could generate important insights about species responses to human-managed landscapes and provide inputs that simplify and empirically ground spatial–dynamic conservation policy analysis.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James N. Sanchirico

  University of California, Davis

  44 shared

• Paul R. Armsworth

  16 shared

• Daniel K. Lew

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  14 shared

• François Massol

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  12 shared

• Benjamin J. Crain

  Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

  9 shared

• Charlotte H. Chang

  Pomona College

  8 shared

• Heather Bird Jackson

  Colorado State University

  8 shared

• Chad Stachowiak

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California-Davis

  2014

• B.A.

  Dartmouth College

  2005