Ecosystems and Wild Birds

We review a selection of published papers that rely on choice experiments, as well as some studies that use contingent valuation, as non-market valuation methods that can be helpful for understanding the tradeoffs that people are willing to make to protect either individual wild bird species, categories of species (guilds), or the habitats upon which these species rely. Our review focuses on the features of these studies that make them more or less suitable for ‘benefits-function transfer,’ where the policy-related usefulness of the original research can be multiplied by transferring the estimated models to predict benefits associated with other types of wild birds in other regions.

Outdoor recreation is considered a cultural ecosystem service with well-documented benefits to human health and well-being. Some outdoor recreation activities are regulated and require participants to have a permit or license (e.g., hunting and fishing). However, wildlife watching—and especially birdwatching, a well-established pastime—is a non-consumptive activity that requires no permit or license and thus leaves few formal data trails. Fortunately, crowd-sourced data with associated volunteered geographic information (VGI), gathered by a variety of citizen/community science (CS) projects and social media platforms, can complement the information about non-consumptive activities provided by standard (typically survey-based) administrative datasets.

Citizen/community science samples are self-selected, limiting their value for predicting population behavior. We field a general-population survey to elicit different levels of knowledge about (or engagement with) the eBird project and transfer a fitted sample-selection function, combining that function with eBird member attributes to correct a model of spatial consideration sets.

In earlier work, we have focused on species richness as a single measure of biodiversity. In this study, we seek to enhance our descriptions of what happens to backyard bird populations with and without an avian biodiversity protection program. The survey instrument for our stated-preference choice experikment includes enough abundance information about individual species of regionally common backyard birds to permit the calculation of a variety of alternative biodiversity measures. These include not only the species richness, but also the Shannon index, the Simpson index, the Simpson Reciprocal index, and others. The choice tasks in our choice experiment specifically describe the consequences of the policy for each of the top 25 backyard bird species in the respondent’s Bird Conservation Region, in batches of five, as well as the average effects on all other common backyard (passerine) species in the area.

Members of Cornell University’s eBird project report bird sitings at geo-coded destinations. With origin information, we can infer the value to this group of biodiversity in bird species by observing how much more in travel costs they are willing to incur to gain opportunities to see more diverse populations of birds.

Members of Cornell University’s eBird project report bird sitings at geo-coded destinations. With origin information, we can infer the value to this group of biodiversity in bird species by observing how much more in travel costs they are willing to incur to gain opportunities to see more diverse populations of birds.