Using a residency index to estimate the economic value of coastal habitat provisioning services for commercially important fish species

Abstract

Coastal habitats worldwide face various threats, including sea level rise and land conversion. Coastal habitat loss has important economic consequences, as many of these habitats provide valuable ecosystem services including flood protection, carbon sequestration, and nursery areas for commercially fished species. Quantifying the economic value of these ecosystem services helps target policies for coastal habitat restoration. Here, we demonstrate how to quantify the contribution made by coastal habitats to the revenue (e.g., ex-vessel values) of commercially fished species by estimating a residency index. This residency index weights the relative importance of a habitat along a species' lifecycle by explicitly incorporating the target species' life histories and the estimated proportion of time the species spends in that habitat at different life stages. We demonstrate how this method can be used to estimate the value of saltmarsh to UK commercial fisheries landings. This analysis suggests that UK saltmarsh contributes annually between 15% and 17.5% of total UK commercial landings for European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax), European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa), and Common sole (Solea solea). Our findings support an economic argument for saltmarsh protection and restoration. Furthermore, our approach provides a general framework that integrates demographic methods and economic analyses to assess the value of saltmarsh and other coastal habitats for fisheries worldwide.