Valuing Environmental Assets on Rural Lifestyle Properties

Abstract

Lifestyle landowners value land for its amenities and ecological characteristics and could play an important role in managing and conserving native vegetation in multifunctional rural landscapes. We quantify values of ecosystem services captured by owners of rural lifestyle properties in Victoria, Australia, using a spatial hedonic property price model. The value of ecosystem services provided by native vegetation is maximized when that vegetation occupies about 40 percent of the area of a lifestyle property. Since the current median proportion of native vegetation is 15 percent, most lifestyle landowners could benefit from increasing the area of native vegetation on their properties.

Valuing public and private urban tree canopy cover

“…However, the choice of weight matrix should be guided by the research question and underlying data structure. In this study, we follow Polyakov et al (2013) to identify an appropriate threshold-based spatial weight matrix, with both threshold distance and weights derived from the observed data, that is, by analysing residuals of the ordinary least squares hedonic model. Furthermore, we use a different approach to construct a weight matrix to represent the spatial lag relationship for the response variable.…”

What Makes a Locality Attractive? Estimates of the Amenity Value of Parks for Victoria

“…There are also a set of studies that include distance to parks as controls while analysing other issues such as urban tree coverage (Pandit et al , ; Pandit et al , ; Plant et al , ) or specific types of properties (Polyakov et al , ; Polyakov et al , ). These studies also concentrate on estimating and analysing hedonic regression equations.…”

Learning from agri-environment schemes in Australia: Investing in biodiversity and other ecosystem services on farms

“…While they did not find a measureable impact on property value when native vegetation covered less than 50 per cent of property area, coverage above 50 per cent decreased property value. Polyakov et al (2013) estimated that the native vegetation on rural lifestyle properties in Victoria has a positive and diminishing marginal value, with the property value maximised when the proportion of area occupied by native vegetation is approximately 40 per cent, which increases property value by 10.5 per cent relative to the value of a similar property without native vegetation. However, when the area occupied by native vegetation exceeds 80 per cent of the property, the value of the property is reduced to less than the value associated with no native vegetation.…”

“…However, when the area occupied by native vegetation exceeds 80 per cent of the property, the value of the property is reduced to less than the value associated with no native vegetation. Since the current extent of native vegetation is lower than the extent that would maximise its amenity value to many landholders (Polyakov et al 2013), the welfare value to people living in the landscape may be improved by restoring native vegetation on cleared lands.…”