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The Economic Value of Recreation and Coastal Water Quality in New England
Citation:
Merrill, N., M. Mazzotta, K. Mulvaney, S. Lyon, AND J. Twichell. The Economic Value of Recreation and Coastal Water Quality in New England. Restore America's Estuaries 9th National Summit, Long Beach, CA, December 08 - 13, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Coastal waters in New England are adversely affected by nutrients. This work is part of a larger project investigating the effects of water quality issues on social-ecological systems. This presentation will describe research on values of recreational users for coastal water quality in New England. The results will provide information that regional, state and local managers can use when making decisions regarding efforts to restore good water quality in coastal systems.
Description:
Nutrient over-enrichment is a significant problem in coastal waterbodies, particularly estuaries, across the United States. At the Atlantic Ecology Division of the U.S. EPA, we are working on an interdisciplinary project to understand various aspects of the impacts of nutrient over-enrichment on New England’s estuaries to help inform coastal watershed management decisions related to nutrients. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of several socio-economic studies of coastal recreation that we are conducting as part of this broader research program. These studies include: 1) the use of existing data to estimate the number of people affected by changes in coastal and estuarine water quality and the economic value of those changes; 2) a primary data collection effort using a revealed preference survey to elicit coastal New England residents’ values for water recreation, sense of place, and perceptions of water quality; and, 3) an estimation of estuarine recreational use based on observational data. Collectively, this work will provide a comprehensive picture of how water quality affects the value of coastal recreation in coastal areas and estuaries, including how human perceptions relate to biophysical metrics of water quality, and how people’s sense of place affects their perceptions and values. This information is critical for providing information on those affected by degraded water quality to inform efforts to restore good water quality in coastal systems.