Assessing the Ecological Value of an Urban Forest Park: A Case Study of Sinhua Forest Park in Taiwan

Abstract

Urban forests offer multiple functions: they can balance negative effects from the environment and provide the public with a place for leisure and recreation. Hence, urban forests are crucial to urban ecology and have been widely studied. In addition, relevant study results were applied for policymaking in urban development and forest park management. This study evaluated the ecological value of the Sinhua Forest Park and examined whether the socioeconomic background of participants influences their willingness to pay (WTP) for ecological conservation. Questionnaires were distributed to visitors in the Sinhua Forest Park in Tainan, Taiwan, and the payment card format of the contingent valuation method was employed to evaluate the ecological value. The results showed that the visitors had an annual WTP of $22.01 per person. However, when samples with protest responses were excluded, the WTP rose to $24.58. By considering the total number of visitors of a year, the total ecological value was $1,426,964.14/year and reached $1,593,257.31/year after excluding the protest samples. This study also analyzed participants’ within-variable socioeconomic background (e.g., gender and education) and discovered that male participants who are aged 60 years or older, with an education level of senior/vocational high school, and those who visited green spaces two to three times per week presented a high WTP score on average. A Tobit regression model was employed for examination, and the results indicated that participants’ education and frequency of visiting green spaces significantly influenced their WTP for the ecological conservation of the Sinhua Forest Park.

Assessment of Recreational Value in a Protected Forest Area Considering the New Environmental Paradigm (Case Study: Helen Forest, Southwestern Iran)

“…Previous studies have also demonstrated the positive impact of environmental attitudes on the value of environmental goods and services. For instance, [38,66,107] found a positive and significant effect of the NEP on people's WTP in their research. As highlighted in [47], positive environmental attitudes correlate with increased WTP for environmental protection, a trend corroborated by findings in this study.…”

“…The NEP scale is a globally recognized survey tool crafted to gauge environmental concerns across populations using a comprehensive set of fifteen statements [64]. These statements within the NEP address attitudes toward the environment [65] and are categorized into five dimensions: acceptance of growth limits, anti-anthropocentrism, recognition of natural balance fragility, rejection of exceptionalism, and acknowledgment of a potential ecocrisis [66]. This section prompts respondents with statements reflecting either an anthropocentric or ecocentric worldview, asking them to rate their agreement from "fully disagree" to "fully agree".…”

Preferences of Young Adults concerning the Pocket Parks with Water Reservoirs in the Aspect of Willingness to Pay (WTP) in Warsaw City, Poland

“…Even though these objects are mostly small green spaces, their significance to the population is very high [26][27][28][29][30] especially in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic [19]. The willingness to pay by young adults for urban forestry itself is variable and depends on many factors, including, for example, the structure of the forest and small architecture, etc., [23,[31][32][33][34][35]. Determining the accuracy and reliability of the hypothetical WTP amounts reported is also significant.…”

“…The research carried out in Warsaw pocket parks is in line with this trend. However, there is no shortage of scientific reports that do not support this relationship [33][34][35]38,43,52]. This possibly comes from the fact that most often no entrance fees are charged to these types of facilities, and any costs of maintaining them are usually borne by local/municipal or state budgets.…”

Evaluation of the Thermal Environmental Effects of Urban Ecological Networks—A Case Study of Xuzhou City, China

“…The ecological space within a given city provides citizens with basic social functions, such as recreation and leisure [28][29][30], and important ecological service functions [31][32][33]. In the field of urban planning, ecological spatial planning and layout design more notably consider social service functions [34,35].…”