Valuation of national park system visitation: the efficient use of count data models, meta-analysis, and secondary visitor survey data

Applying best-worst scaling to rank ecosystem and economic benefits of restoration and conservation in the Great Lakes

Since 2010, over $2.4 billion in public funds have been invested in the cleanup and restoration of the Great Lakes Basin through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Efforts have targeted restoration of Areas of Concern and other degraded sites. While the ecological benefits of Great Lakes restoration have been highlighted by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the economic benefits studied by the binational International Joint Commission, public preferences for Great Lakes conservation and restoration have not been well studied. Using best-worst scaling and a seven-preference choice set, 1,215 Basin residents quantitatively ranked their preferred reasons to restore and conserve Great Lakes shorelines and waterways, with a focus on restoration at Areas of Concern and National Park Service sites. The analysis shows the most preferred reason for restoration and conservation is to promote human health, followed by the protection of native species, and the prevention of new invasive species from entering the Great Lakes. The least preferred reason for restoration and conservation is to improve local property values. Although respondents' top reason was human-centered, respondents' preferred ecosystem conservation over the benefits of economic revitalization, recreational use, and improved property values. Preferences analyzed by gender, income, and home location followed these same rankings. Preferences for habitat restoration and the prevention of invasive species align with the focus areas guiding the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, providing evidence of public support for this expansive, publicly funded restoration effort.

Economic Valuation of Conservation of Inholdings in Protected Areas for the Institution of Payments for Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services, as public goods, are often undersupplied because private markets do not fully take into account the social cost of production. To alleviate the concern about this imbalance situation, payments for ecosystem services (PES) have emerged as a preferable alternative. While temples in Korea have owned a considerable part of the national parks, a PES approach can be used as a viable option to alleviate the conflicts among visitors, non-visitors, and temples. The purpose of this paper is to assess the economic values of ecosystem services provided by temple forests as a compensation mechanism. Using a contingent valuation method, an online survey was conducted with 1000 respondents. Study results showed that the economic benefits of the conservation of temple forests were estimated to be substantial, ranging from ₩5980 (US $5.42) to ₩7709 ($7.08) per household per year. The results also confirmed the effects of social factors such as individuals’ trust in the government’s environmental policies and importance on the conservation of temples’ cultural and religious values on the willingness to pay. With a growing interest in securing ecosystem services through a PES approach, estimating economic benefits of the conservation of inholdings in public protected areas will be a valuable piece of information as an important policy decision-making tool.

Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs

Land managers rely on visitation data to inform policy and management decisions. However, visitation data is often costly and burdensome to obtain, and provides a limited depth of information. In this paper, we assess the validity of using crowd-sourced, online photographs to infer information about the habits and preferences of recreational visitors by comparing empirical data from the National Park Service to photograph data from the online platform Flickr for 38 National Parks in the western United States. Using multiple regression analysis, we find that the number of photos posted monthly in a park can reliably indicate the number of visitors to a park in a given month. Through additional statistical testing we also find that the home locations of photo-takers, provided voluntarily on an online profile, accurately show the home origins of park visitors. Together, these findings validate a new method for measuring recreational visitation, opening an opportunity for land managers worldwide to track and understand visitation by augmenting current data collection methods with crowd-sourced, online data that is easy and inexpensive to obtain. In addition, it enables future research on how visitation rates change with changes in access, management or infrastructure, weather events, or ecosystem health, and facilitates valuation research, such as travel cost studies.

Who visits a national park and what do they get out of it?: a joint visitor cluster analysis and travel cost model for Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park visitor data were obtained from a survey collected for the National Park Service by the Park Studies Unit at the University of Idaho. Travel cost models have been conducted for national parks in the United States; however, this study builds on these studies and investigates how benefits vary by types of visitors who participate in different activities while at the park. Visitor clusters were developed based on activities in which a visitor participated while at the park. The clusters were analyzed and then incorporated into a travel cost model to determine the economic value (consumer surplus) that the different visitor groups received from visiting the park. The model was estimated using a zero-truncated negative binomial regression corrected for endogenous stratification. The travel cost price variable was estimated using both 1/3 and 1/4 the wage rate to test for sensitivity to opportunity cost specification. The average benefit across all visitor cluster groups was estimated at between $235 and $276 per person per trip. However, per trip benefits varied substantially across clusters; from $90 to $103 for the "value picnickers," to $185-$263 for the "backcountry enthusiasts," $189-$278 for the "do it all adventurists," $204-$303 for the "windshield tourists," and $323-$714 for the "creature comfort" cluster group.