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Despite the economic valuation of forest park resources has triggered a great deal of interest to the research community and park management, up to now no attention has been paid to the effect of psychological factors such as tourist satisfaction, which could potentially play a considerable role in contributing to the park resource valuation. This article attempts to fill this niche by carrying out a study on the economic valuation of the Xian-Ren-Tai National Forest Park in China, taking consideration of the tourist satisfaction. In the process, the choice experiment survey was used for data collection. Then, both conditional logit (CL) and random parameter logit models were used in parameter estimations to examine the factors that could potentially impact on the tourists’ willingness to pay. Results indicate that the tourists attach the greatest importance to the park’s natural environment and traffic conditions, and yet the level of tourists’ satisfaction on their tourism experience plays a big part in explaining the valuation results. Tourists who uphold a high level of satisfaction tend to pay more for the park attribute improvement than those with less satisfaction ones. The estimated compensating variation of the overall current park attributes has reached ¥184.95 per person per trip, of which 12.83% shall be attributable to the tourist satisfaction.

It has been well recognized that the urban landscape ecosystem is able to make a great contribution to the quality of life for people who live in the city and beyond, thus it can potentially accrue a significant economic value to the human well-being. However, due to its public good nature, it is difficult to monetizing its values in a systematic manner. In this paper, we attempt to assess the economic value of the urban landscape through people's life satisfaction approach utilizing a large sample of dataset complied from the general public survey in Dalian City which is one of the well-known tourism cities in China. The results indicate that most of the urban landscape attributes impose significant effects on people's life satisfaction, thus accruing a considerable amount of value to the local residents. Taking a 10-point ranking scale for the urban landscape quality as an example, the household willingness to pay on average reaches ¥24,579 per annum for one point of ranking level increase. Relative to the low level of household income, those high-income households are much keener to the changes of the landscape quality. If the urban landscape quality is disaggregated into five levels, household's marginal willingness-to-pay diminishes as the urban landscape's rank level is improved.

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Background: Grasslands provide a wide variety of ecosystem services that contribute to human wellbeing. While an increasing number of studies are evaluating the monetary value of grassland ecosystem services, most of them focus on specific grassland ecosystem services at regional or local scales, and they use different assessment methods. Methods: This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the economic value of global grassland ecosystem services based on a meta-analysis of 702 observations from 134 primary studies. Results:The economic values of different ecosystem services cover a wide range of grassland types, regions, and estimation methods. The annual economic value per hectare ranges from $3955 for semidesert grasslands to $5466 for tropical grasslands. On average, regulating services have the highest value, which is approximately four times that of provisioning services or approximately eight times that of food supply services. Several factors impact the estimated ecosystem service values, including the evaluation method, source and year of publication, and study site. The results indicate that the annual economic value of global grasslands exceeds $20.8 trillion. Conclusions:The findings of this study not only provide useful information for understanding the economic value of various ecosystem services associated with different types of grasslands but also have important policy implications for the ecological conservation of grassland globally.

Despite the increasing number of visitors to Galapagos National Park, the tourism industry pays little attention to the distinct preferences of tourists toward park attributes, including both its natural resources and managerial emphasis. To “monetize” the benefits of these attributes requires utilizing nonmarket valuation techniques. Using a stated preference questionnaire, we estimated the economic value of the park’s recreational attributes. The following five attributes were selected: endangered species, prevalence of garbage, site infrastructure, air quality, and entrance fees. The results of this study demonstrate that tourists place the highest willingness to pay values on increased protection of animal species (US$26.9) and garbage reduction (US$111.2). These results highlight the economic contributions for park management, with a potential for value improvement of US$38.1 per tourist if the park’s combined attributes are upgraded from the present condition to the optimum condition.

Estimating the economic value of ecosystem services has become one of the most fertile areas in ecological economics. In this paper, we propose a novel method of using a tourist satisfaction model to evaluate the recreational services being embedded in forest ecosystems. We establish a functional relationship between tourist satisfaction and recreational attributes based on the survey data of China National Forest Parks. The results indicate that each recreational attribute considered enables the generation of a significant amount of tourism welfare for tourists, whereas tourist congestion was found to be a negative contributor to tourists’ satisfaction. Reducing congestion from the current level is the most valued recreational attribute for tourists, and the willingness to pay for it is as high as CNY 623.18 (USD 92.29) per visitor per trip. Additionally, local and nonlocal tourists display a divergent degree of preference for the recreational attributes and their levels of willingness to pay.