Final answer:
The best excerpt that develops the author's claim is about evaluating the success of conservation efforts through adequate project performance assessment.
Step-by-step explanation:
The best excerpt that develops the author's claim that the Forest Service continues to seek effective ways to assess the value of recreation is:
Conservationists can only develop cost-effective strategies by evaluating the success of their past efforts. However, few programs measure project performance adequately: most carry out no assessment at all or rely on descriptive analyses that cannot distinguish between the confounding effects of different covariates.
In response, Ferraro and Pattanayak (2006) have presented a counterfactual design for determining conservation success.
This involves comparing similar sampling units, e.g. villages, people or forest patches, which receive conservation intervention (the treatment group) with those that do not (the control group). Here, we describe two studies that have used this approach to evaluate conservation effectiveness.