The economic value of stream restoration

Abstract

The economic value of restoring Deckers Creek in Monongalia and Preston counties of West Virginia was determined from mail, Internet, and personal contact surveys. Multiattribute, choice experiments were conducted and nested logit models were estimated to derive the economic values of full restoration for three attributes of this creek: aquatic life, swimming, and scenic quality. Their relative economic values were that aquatic life > scenic quality ≈ swimming. These economic values imply that respondents had the highest value for aquatic life when fully restoring Deckers Creek to a sustainable fishery rather than a "put and take" fishery that cannot sustain fish populations. The welfare improvement estimates for full restoration of all three attributes ranged between $12 and $16 per month per household. Potential stream users (anglers) had the largest welfare gain from restoration, while nonangler respondents had the lowest. When these estimates were aggregated up to the entire watershed population, the benefit from restoration of Deckers Creek was estimated to be about $1.9 million annually. This benefit does not account for any economic values from partial stream restoration. On the basis of log likelihood tests of the nested logit models, two subsamples of the survey population (the general population and stream users) were found to be from the same population. Thus restoration choices by stream users may be representative of the watershed population, although the sample size of stream users was small in this research. Copyright 2005 by the American Geophysical Union.