Ecological Modelling 149 (2002) 85 – 95 An approach to evaluate the effect of property size on land-use options in semi-arid rangelands K.W. Tomlinson a, *, J.W. Hearne a , R.R. Alexander b a School of Mathematics, Statistics and Information Technology, Uniersity of Natal, Priate Bag X01, Pietermaritzburg 3209, South Africa b Department of Applied and International Economics, Massey Uniersity, Palmerston North, New Zealand Abstract It is claimed that high returns can be achieved from hunting and ecotourism operations. As a result wildlife production is a rapidly growing form of land-use in South Africa. Lately, rural African communities have approached regional conservation agencies for aid to establish small game reserves so that they too may benefit from wildlife production. However, wildlife operations have high input costs relative to domestic stock operations and no attempt has been made to determine the effect of property size on the costs and revenue generated by wildlife. This paper attempts to develop a method for identifying the relevant economic variables of wildlife production, subsistence production and commercial beef production and the revenues that these separate land-uses generate. Thence to observe their relationship with property size by means of an illustrative example. In this way the size ranges for which each of the three land-uses is most appropriate can be determined. Finally, the method is evaluated against the results of the example to identify future refinement. The results of this example indicate that the profit curve of wildlife rises far more steeply than those of either subsistence production or commercial beef production. However, due to the effect of high input costs associated with wildlife, both commercial and subsistence beef production are more profitable at small land sizes. This indicates that investing large sums of money into small game reserves of the order of 3000 ha or less may not be justified on the basis of profits alone. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Economies of scale; Wildlife production; Livestock production; Savannah land-use www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolmodel 1. Introduction Originally, conservation areas were established with little or no regard for local people. The management strategy was preservationist and em- phasised a planning role aimed at excluding local people (Wells et al., 1992). The theme of protect- ing natural phenomena from exploitation for pub- lic enjoyment served as the model for development of protected areas worldwide (Mach- lis and Tichnell, 1985). Communities next to these reserves frequently bore substantial costs as a result of lost access to wildlife, vegetation and water resources, for which they received little compensation (Cumming, 1993). Local communi- ties tended to be poor and as such perceived the * Corresponding author. Tel.: +27-33-260-5645; fax: +27- 33-260-5648. E-mail address: tomlinsonk@nu.ac.za (K.W. Tomlinson). 0304-3800/02/$ - see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0304-3800(01)00516-6