The recreational value of coral reefs: A meta-analysis

Abstract

Coral reefs are highly productive ecosystems that provide a variety of valuable goods and services, including recreational opportunities. The open-access nature and public good characteristics of coral reefs often result in them being undervalued in decision making related to their use and conservation. In response to this, there now exists a substantial economic valuation literature on coral reefs. For the purposes of conducting a meta-analysis of this literature, we collected 166 coral reef valuation studies, 52 of which provided sufficient information for a statistical meta-analysis, yielding 100 separate value observations in total. Focusing on recreational values, we use US$ per visit as the dependent variable in our meta-analysis. The meta-regression results reveal a number of important factors in explaining variation in coral reef recreational values, notably the area of dive sites and the number of visitors. Different valuation methods are shown to produce widely different values, with the contingent valuation method producing significantly lower value estimates. Using a multi-level modelling approach we also control for authorship effects, which proves to be highly significant in explaining variation in value estimates. We assess the prospects for using this analysis for out-of-sample value transfer, and find average transfer errors of 186%. We conclude that there is a need for further high-quality valuation research on coral reefs.

Commercial coral-reef fisheries across Micronesia: A need for improving management

“…Such measures are aimed at increasing not only the number of fish landed, but also profitability for local fishers (McClanahan 2010). Coralreef fisheries support tourism industries, subsistence livelihoods, the fishing industry, and coral-reef ecosystem integrity (Costanza et al 1997;Brander et al 2007;Bell et al 2010). Clearly, their improved management is tied to Micronesia's prosperity and livelihood.…”

“…While self-reinforcing mechanisms are driving harvest volumes up, many desirable reef fish are known to have slow growth and late reproductive maturation (Choat et al 1996;Birkeland 2004;Heupel et al 2010). The consequences of ensuing fishery depletions include reduced ecological functions and altered trophic structures that threaten coral-reef integrity and resilience (Folke et al 2004;Cinner and McClanahan 2006;Houk et al 2010), as well as social structure (Costanza et al 1997;Brander et al 2007).…”

Meta‐analysis: A need for well‐defined usage in ecology and conservation biology

“…Repeatedly, multiple regression studies from the journal Ecological Economics (Brander et al 2007, Richardson and Loomis 2009, Barrio and Loureiro 2010 or correlational studies were termed meta-analysis (Hartley and Hunter 1998, Benayas et al 2009, Creel and Rotella 2010. Also, the votecounting approach that utilizes p-values instead of effect sizes, is commonly confused with metaanalysis (Chalfoun et al 2002, Nájera andSimonetti 2010), although it has been pointed out several times that vote-counting is statistically problematic and may result in false conclusions (Gurevitch and Hedges 1999, Borenstein et al 2009:251-255, Higgins and Green 2011.…”

Coral reef metrics and habitat equivalency analysis

“…Coral reefs provide extensive ecosystem services [17,[28][29][30][31]. Valuation techniques for coral reef ecosystem services vary widely [28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38], and different valuation methods can produce very different results [37]. Unlike ecosystem goods -which are harvests of environmental products for direct human use [39] -such as subsistence or recreational fisheries -many ecosystem services never pass though an economic open market to obtain an actual market value.…”