Description

The National Wildlife Refuge Systems 150 million acres in over 500 refuges representdiverse landscapes with different capacities to provide ecosystem goods and services to society.Natural processes associated with management of national wildlife refuges provide benefits tolocal communities by sustaining production of specific goods and services that are useful topeople. Estimated economic values of these services, such as those presented in this report, can be used to compare refuges in different locations and under different management, climatic, or socioeconomic conditions. Our estimates of economic benefits from natural ecosystems serve as complements to economic impact analyses, such as the FWSs Banking on Nature studies Carver and Caudill 2007. This report presents the methods and results from Phase I of our research project. In this report we compare wetlands on four national wildlife refuges to illustrate how existing data can be used to estimate the average annual economic benefits of specific ecosystem services from different types of wetlands. The four sites are Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge NWR, North Dakota; Blackwater NWR, Maryland; Okefenokee NWR, Georgia; and Sevilleta and Bosque del Apache NWRs, New Mexico. These four sites were selected to contrast major types of wetlands in terms of physical and social parameters that influence the values of different ecosystem goods and services. We present multiple approaches to assessing ecosystem services benefits. For each of the four refuges, we first consider a purely qualitative assessment of the relative magnitudes of different ecosystem service benefits provided by each refuge. This approach proves to be the most inclusive in terms of our ability to consider ecological data specific to the refuge, and provides a useful tool for broad assessments and comparisons across refuges. However, it does not lead to quantitative estimates of ecosystem service benefits. For these estimates, we use two different benefit transfer techniques: 1 a metaanalysis benefit transfer to estimate the economic values of storm protection, water quality provisioning, and support for nursery and habitat for commercial fishing species; and 2 a point transfer approach to estimate the value of stored carbon. Our results suggest that refuge size and the sociodemographic characteristics of the surrounding region are important determinates of the estimated per acre value of wetlands in providing ecosystem services. Consistent with economic theory, larger refuges in areas with lower population density tend to have lower per acre values. However, these interaction effects between wetland size, population size and preferences, and ecosystem service values need to be further studied. Our results are an approximation of consumers aggregate willingness to pay to obtain the service provided by the wetlands of a particular NWR. Decision makers can use these numbers to understand how a population might be impacted by a change in distribution of wetlands across a landscape. The most straightforward application of the method we follow concerns estimating the net economic value of a change in an ecosystem service due to a management action which changes a wetland from one type to another. This report represents Phase I of our efforts to estimate the ecosystem service benefits of the National Wildlife Refuge System. The primary focus of the second phase will be the development of a metaanalysis benefit transfer model specifically tailored toward wetlands in National Wildlife Refuges.

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