Recommended citation: Netusil, N. R., S. T. M. Dissanayake, L. Lavelle, A. W. Ando, and K. K. Wells. 2023. "Does presentation matter? An analysis of images and text in a choice experiment of green roofs." Q Open. 3(1):1-23. doi: 10.1093/qopen/qoad010
Grasslands offer a variety of ecosystem services including recreational opportunities. Unlike forests and coastal beaches, grasslands do not offer natural opportunities for recreators to adapt to extremely warm temperatures, potentially making grassland recreation sensitive to climate change. I use mobility data to estimate a causal model of the relationship between short-run weather shocks and demand for recreation at 16 nationally notable grasslands between January 2019 and April 2022. I use a repeated discrete choice random utility maximization model and specify visit utility as a function of a set of average temperature, precipitation, average wind speed, and snowfall bins. I identify the causal relationship using grassland, month-of-year, and hunting season fixed effects. Willingness to pay (WTP) per household for a grassland day visit is about $53.60 on average - nearly twice the WTP for a coastal fishing trip in the Eastern U.S. I find that grassland recreators are averse to visiting during months with more extreme average temperature days, but having more days with average temperatures slightly above extreme cold has no effect on demand. Snowfall is also a significant demand determiner. Responses to temperature and snowfall are heterogeneous across historical climate regions. Projections for 2081 - 2100 suggest grassland recreators are likely to experience average annual welfare gains from climate change of up to $1.3 million from increased visit quality rather than quantity.
Recreation is one of many ecosystem services grasslands provide globally (Zhao et al. 2020). In the Tallgrass Prairie Region of the United States public and private groups like USDA, U.S. Forest Service, and The Nature Conservancy are actively involved in restoring and preserving grasslands to which they provide varying degrees of public access. How much do people living in the Tallgrass Prairie Region states of Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota value the recreational opportunities grasslands provide? I answer this question using the travel cost method. Although the literature contains related travel cost studies (e.g., Knoche et al. 2015), this is the first study to focus on grassland recreation in this region outside of the context of specific grassland species or conservation programs. Data on trip demand comes from a general population survey of adults living in the three target states. I estimate a repeated discrete choice model (Morey et al. 1993) and find that average per-trip recreational value for grasslands in the region is just under $10. I also find that people over 65 and those who identify as black are significantly more likely to choose not to recreate at a grassland than people between 18 and 24 and people who identify as white and not Hispanic.
Grassland, or prairie, ecosystems provide many benefits to society including species habitat, carbon sequestration, soil erosion control, and recreational opportunities. At the same time, grassland ecosystems in North America are disappearing, with grassland loss in most areas exceeding 80% since the mid-1800’s; in Illinois the loss is 99.9%. The USDA protects and restores grasslands through the Conservation Reserve Program. However, it is more costly for farmers to plant high quality grassland habitat on CRP acres, and much remains unknown about public willingness to pay (WTP) for grassland restoration projects and how that varies with grassland quality and public access to restored grasslands. This study quantifies the relationship between the value of grassland restoration and its ecological quality and public access. We use a choice experiment survey of residents in the Tallgrass Prairie region that includes area restored, ecological quality, public access with and without hunting, and annual cost to households as attributes. There were two experimental treatments in survey administration: with and without video (to see if video of the thing being valued changes respondents’ expressed preferences) and with the cost attribute expressed in terms of sales tax or income tax (to see if this affected responses from low income people who do not pay income tax.) We find that people have large MWTP for acres of grassland restored, and that the premium people are willing to pay for diverse grassland habitat is high. We also find that people have large MWTP to have walking and biking, while the average MWTP to have hunting also available is negative. Findings yield interesting insights into how preferences for open space and recreation vary among different groups of people.
Before European settlement, diverse, functioning grassland covered much of the major grassland regions in the Midwestern and Western parts of the U.S. Recent estimates suggest that nearly 80% of the historical extent of grasslands in this part of the country have been converted for agriculture and development and conversion continues today. Grasslands are important for carbon sequestration, controlling soil erosion, and providing pollinator habitat. USDA and other organizations know grassland restoration is valuable, but do not know how much people value their restoration at the landscape level. This research addresses this question for the Tallgrass, Mixed Grass, and Short Grass prairie regions using a nationally representative choice experiment survey of over 1,200 Americans. We focus on these prairie regions because over 76% of all acres enrolled in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in 2022 were located there, making these regions most likely to be the focus of a similar landscape-level restoration project. In the survey, we present each respondent with six choice tasks each including a program and status quo option. Program attributes include the size of the area restored to grassland, the quality of the restored grassland, the extent of public access on the restored land, and the annual cost of the program to each respondent’s household as an increase in federal taxes. This research also addresses two methodological questions relevant to the choice experiment literature. The first relates to the inclusion of factual but politically divisive information about climate change in the survey influences willingness to pay (WTP). The second explores whether including a follow-up question intended to help identify yea-sayers provides information in addition to more commonly used follow-up questions for hypothetical bias mitigation (e.g., consequentiality questions). We contracted with IPSOS to elicit responses to the survey from their Knowledge Panel. Data collection was completed in Fall 2023. The most preferred program (with the highest level of quality and highest level of public access without hunting) produces a total value to adult Americans of about $5.2 billion per million acres restored. This estimate more than exceeds the average cost the government incurred to enroll an additional million acres in USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program in 2022 ($80.83 million). We also find descriptive evidence suggesting that being exposed to factual, but politically divisive, information affects WTP among people who identify as a member of a major political party but has no effect on independents.
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Download DatasetThis dataset contains transcribed entries from the “Prairie Directory of North America” (Adelman and Schwartz 2013) for the Tallgrass, Mixed Grass, and Shortgrass prairie regions of the united states. We identified the historical spatial extent of the Tallgrass, Mixed Grass, and Shortgrass prairie regions using Ricketts et al. (1999), Olson et al. (2001), and Dixon et al. (2014) and selected the counties entirely or partially within these boundaries from the USDA Forest Service (2022) file. The resulting lists of counties are included as separate files. The dataset contains information on publicly accessible grasslands and prairies in these regions including acreage and amenities like hunting access, restrooms, parking, and trails. This is joint work with undergraduates Carlos Martinez and Gisselle Pena.
Recommended citation: Martinez, C., G. Pena, and K. K. Wells. 2024. 'Prairie Directory of North America' (2013) Entries for the Tallgrass, Mixed Grass, and Shortgrass Prairie Regions of the United States. Illinois Data Bank. doi: 10.13012/B2IDB-0421892_V1