TOWARD ASSESSING THE NON-MARKET BENEFITS OF EXPERIMENT STATION RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY OF PUBLIC PREFERENCES FOR AES RESEARCH IN RHODE ISLAND

This study reports on a survey assessment of the public preferences for the Rhode Island Agricultural Experiment Station's research program. The study summarizes preferences to allocate effort to alternative research projects and estimates the public's willingness to pay to maintain or increase research effort.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

WHO ARE RESOURCE NONUSERS AND WHAT CAN THEY TELL US ABOUT NONUSE VALUES? AN APPLICATION TO COASTAL WETLAND RESTORATION

This paper assesses the potential for incomplete definitions of resource use to influence estimates of nonuser WTP, and whether uses underlying certain use values may escape measurement using standard mechanisms applied to distinguish resource users from nonusers. Empirical results are drawn from a stated preference analysis involving coastal wetland restoration.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Coastal Recreation in Southern New England: Results from a Regional Survey

This paper presents a summary of coastal recreation of New England residents from a survey conducted in the summer of 2018. The management of New England’s coasts benefits from understanding the value of coastal recreation and the factors influencing recreational behavior. To address this need, the survey collected the geographic location and trip details for both day and overnight visits to any type of location on the New England coast for a range of water recreation activities, providing a comprehensive view of coastal recreation in the region. This paper summarizes participation in various types of water recreation activities, including beachgoing, swimming, fishing, wildlife viewing, boating, and other coastal recreation activities. We quantify demand for coastal recreation using participation and effort models that disaggregate the dimensions of recreational behavior over space and census demographics. This provides insights on the scale and location of beneficiaries of this important human use of the natural environment. We found that 71% of people in the surveyed region participate in coastal recreation and engage in a wide range of coastal recreation activities at varied locations from open-ocean-facing coastal beaches to sheltered, estuarine ways to water. On average, people in the region take 37 trips to recreate on the coast of New England in a year, spending 167 hours per year visiting recreation sites and 66 hours traveling. This adds up to nearly 170.5 million trips from our sample region, 772.4 million hours of recreation time, and 304.6 million hours of travel time. Distance to the coast, demographics, and recreational activities affect how often people go and how much time they spend on coastal recreation

Setting Priorities for Coastal Wetland Restoration: A GIS-based Tool That Combines Expert Assessments and Public Values

Over the years, many coastal wetlands have been degraded by filling, ditching, pollution, tidal restrictions, or other human activities. Recently, as the public has become more aware of the ecological importance of coastal wetlands, new programs and funding have been devoted to restoring wetlands. Within a given region, many wetlands may be candidates for restoration. However, funds are rarely sufficient to restore all possible sites. Thus, difficult choices must be made. Historically, the choice of coastal wetland restoration activities has often been unsystematic and politically driven, with restoration funds often going to sites that have strong community or political support. While community and political support are important, such ad hoc decisions may not lead to the most effective use of public funds. Recently, there has been a move towards prioritizing potential restoration sites based on ecological goals for a watershed or other region. Scientists have developed a number of tools to assess wetland functions, both before and after restoration (see Bartoldus, 1999 for examples). Many of these methods, however, require detailed, expensive, and time consuming field studies. Thus, these methods are most appropriate for evaluating sites already selected for restoration, or for making fine distinctions once a preliminary set of restoration sites has been selected. In this project, we are developing a decision-support tool that considers both social and ecological values for prioritizing coastal wetland restoration projects, using an integrated combination of ecological and economic indicators. While, ideally, restoration actions would be evaluated based on site-specific measures of the full range of economic and ecological values for each site, funding and time constraints often do not allow for the required full scale public and ecological field studies. Accordingly, the goal of this project is to develop a method that can be used to evaluate potential restoration sites using existing GIS data. This method should be useful as a first cut evaluation of sites for restoration, to select a set of sites that best meet various objectives. Site specific studies can then be conducted to further refine the restoration decisions. This approach can provide a cost-effective method for prioritizing wetland restoration actions, addressing both ecological and economic factors, and can thus help agencies spend public funds for restoration more effectively

Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand Community Impacts of Changes in Water Quality

Understanding people’s values for coastal and freshwater areas is critical for identifying concerns and motivating people to protect water resources and for informing management decisions. Sense of place is a social indicator that captures the relative value that different people hold for specific places. Its use in water quality assessments remains extremely limited but based on lessons from other environmental fields, sense of place offers promise as a tool for measuring an important aspect of the social value of water quality. In this chapter, we propose a quantitative sense-of-place scale and additional qualitative questions which can be used in conjunction with biophysical water quality data and water quality perceptions data to better understand how people’s values change with improvements or degradations in water quality

The Application and Usefulness of Economic Analyses for Water Quality Management in Coastal Areas

Economic studies are increasingly sought as tools to contribute to water quality management in estuaries and coastal communities, yet little is known about how the results from existing studies have been received and utilized by the organizations who solicited them. We interviewed managers from eight organizations who solicited economic studies over the past 15 years to understand how useful the studies were to their organizations and what economic research would be most helpful for their management needs. In terms of utility for coastal managers, there are a number of limitations in the studies. These include lack of site-specific data, the high cost of thorough studies, the appropriate application of methods, and receiving highly technical information that can be difficult to translate to the appropriate stakeholder audiences. Despite these drawbacks, we found the managers to be extremely positive about the usefulness of the economic studies, but in need of more research and localized data. Managers who embark upon economic analyses should take care to engage trained economists who can identify and implement appropriate methodologies to answer management questions, and who can help managers to interpret and communicate the findings. The coastal managers also identified specific areas of research that are most salient for their programs. These range from broad applications of economic analysis as a communication tool, to specific applications such as cost-effectiveness analyses of management actions. Overall, the interviews revealed great interest and utility in economic analyses, and also opportunities for conducting specific economic analyses to improve coastal decision making

Who Are Resource Nonusers and What Can They Tell Us About Nonuse Values? Decomposing User and Nonuser Willingness to Pay for Coastal Wetland Restoration

This article assesses the potential for incomplete definitions of resource use to influence estimates of nonuser willingness to pay (WTP), with an emphasis on resources for which an exhaustive set of uses may be difficult to characterize. The data are drawn from a stated preference analysis involving coastal wetland restoration. Results suggest that mechanisms used to distinguish users and nonusers of wetland services may influence estimates of nonuser WTP and that for some attributes, traditional distinctions between user and nonuser WTP may have arguable empirical justification. More broadly, results suggest that relationships among use behaviors and restoration values may be more complex than are typically assumed and point to limitations in methods frequently used to distinguish user and nonuser WTP

Valuing Coastal Beaches and Closures Using Benefit Transfer: An Application to Barnstable, Massachusetts

Each year, millions of Americans visit beaches for recreation, resulting in significant social welfare benefits and economic activity. Considering the high use of coastal beaches for recreation, closures due to bacterial contamination have the potential to greatly impact coastal visitors and communities. We used readily-available information to develop two transferable models that, together, provide estimates for the value of a beach day as well as the lost value due to a beach closure. We modeled visitation for beaches in Barnstable, Massachusetts on Cape Cod through panel regressions to predict visitation by type of day, for the season, and for lost visits when a closure was posted. We used a meta-analysis of existing studies conducted throughout the United States to estimate a consumer surplus value of a beach visit of around $22 for our study area, accounting for water quality at beaches by using past closure history. We applied this value through a benefit transfer to estimate the value of a beach day, and combined it with lost town revenue from parking to estimate losses in the event of a closure. The results indicate a high value for beaches as a public resource and show significant losses to the town when beaches are closed due to an exceedance in bacterial concentrations

TOWARD ASSESSING THE NON-MARKET BENEFITS OF EXPERIMENT STATION RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY OF PUBLIC PREFERENCES FOR AES RESEARCH IN RHODE ISLAND

This study reports on a survey assessment of the public preferences for the Rhode Island Agricultural Experiment Station's research program. The study summarizes preferences to allocate effort to alternative research projects and estimates the public's willingness to pay to maintain or increase research effort

Decision Making When Choices Are Complex: A Test of Heiner's Hypothesis

This paper explores Heiner's hypothesis concerning a gap between the cognitive ability of decision makers and the difficulty of decisions (the C-D gap). We discuss the implications of decision heuristics for coefficient estimates when uncertainty is faced by decision makers, where the level of uncertainty varies with complexity. Statistical analysis strongly supports the presence of a C-D gap and provides evidence supporting the use of decision heuristics. The results of both direct and indirect methods suggest that mixed decision strategies may be used. We also find that complexity effects can have important implications for welfare analysis.