A comparison of regional and national values for recovering threatened and endangered marine species in the United States

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for environmental goods exhibit some degree of spatial variation. In a policy context, spatial variation in threatened and endangered species values is important to understand, as the benefit stream from policies affecting threatened and endangered species may vary locally, regionally, or among certain population segments. In this paper we present WTP estimates for eight different threatened and endangered marine species estimated from a stated preference choice experiment. WTP is estimated at two different spatial scales: (a) a random sample of over 5000 U.S. households and (b) geographically embedded samples (relative to the U.S. household sample) of nine U.S. Census regions. We conduct region-to-region and region-to-nation statistical comparisons to determine whether species values differ among regions and between each region and the entire U.S. Our results show limited spatial variation between national values and values estimated from regionally embedded samples, and differences are only found for three of the eight species. More variation exists between regions, and for all species there is a significant difference in at least one region-to-region comparison. Given that policy analyses involving threatened and endangered marine species can often be regional in scope (e.g., ecosystem management) or may disparately affect different regions, our results should be of high interest to the marine management community.

The Economic Benefits of the Dokdo Seals Restoration Project in Korea: A Contingent Valuation Study

“…Our sample was allocated to the strata in proportion to each stratum's population characteristics, such as age, income, and gender, resulting in 22 to 230 households being assigned to each stratum. For example, the numbers of surveys allocated to households in Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Incheon Gwangju, Daejeon, Ulsan, Gyunggi, Gangwon, Chungbuk, Chungnam, Jeounbuk, Jeounnam, Gyungbuk, and Gyungnaum were 197, 71, 50, 55, 30,32,22,230,33,33,45,38,39,58, and 67, respectively. A random sampling was implemented within each stratum.…”

“…Bosetti and Pearce [6] carried out a CV survey to estimate WTP for recreational use of seals and found that the mean WTP estimates for seeing seals recovered from an accident in a specialized sanctuary and seeing seals in the wild are GBP 8 and 9 per person, respectively. The mean annual WTP values for recovering humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) and southern resident killer whale (Orcinus orca) in the United States were estimated to be USD 60.98 and 84.38 per household per year, respectively [22].…”

Big Fishery, Big Data, and Little Crabs: Using Genomic Methods to Examine the Seasonal Recruitment Patterns of Early Life Stage Dungeness Crab (Cancer magister) in the California Current Ecosystem

“…Ocean conditions resulting from climate forcing are the primary drivers of fisheries harvest variability within the CCE (Sherman, 2006). The many fishery species annually harvested within the CCE have socioeconomic-importance to the adjacent coastal communities (Fuller et al, 2017;Miller et al, 2017;Ritzman et al, 2018).…”

Economic Valuation of Green Island, Taiwan: A Choice Experiment Method

“…Therefore, CEM can better solve the problem of comparing profit and loss between the multiple attributes of ecosystem services, and it can reveal public preferences for each eco-functional attribute of ecosystem services [34]. Thus, CEM has been widely used for non-market valuation, including species conservation [35][36][37][38][39], wetland recovery [40][41][42][43][44], ecotourism preferences [45][46][47][48][49][50], tourists' preferences for land, the environmental functions of national parks [21,[39][40][41]51,52], and the exploration of methods for altering specific ecosystem services to affect economic benefits [34,[53][54][55][56][57][58].…”