Estimating residents' preferences of the land use program surrounding forest park, Taiwan

Abstract

This paper aims to build up a preference function to evaluate the public benefits of the type of agricultural farming, biodiversity, water provisions, land use type, ecotourism modes, and a monetary attribute (willingness to pay and willingness to work) associated with an ecosystem service and land use program in a forest park. This study used choice experiments to build a random utility model, analyze the average preference for the above land use attributes based on the conditional logit (CL) and used a latent class model to test the residents' heterogeneous preferences for land use planning in the forest park. We also estimated the welfare derived from various land use programs. The empirical result has shown that: (1) increasing organic farming area, increasing the surface water provision, increasing the area of custom flora, increasing the wetland area, and setting up an integrated framework for ecotourism increase the public's preference for the land use program; (2) farmer and non-farmers do not have the same land use preferences, attributes, marginal willingness to pay and willingness to work; and (3) the ecotourism development program incorporating biodiversity, organic farming, ethnobotany, and wetland area with integrated ecotourism has the highest values when compared to other land use program scenarios.