Valuing access to biological collections with contingent valuation and cost–benefit analysis

Abstract

Biological collections may be underutilised because of transaction costs incurred in their use. One way to reduce transaction costs and foster greater utilisation of biological collections that could benefit society is through the creation of a virtual central database of biological collections, available online. The objective of this paper is to estimate the benefits of this policy change using a dichotomous choice contingent valuation survey of the primary users of biological collections. Marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for access to a new central database linking collections around Australia was investigated through an annual user fee payment vehicle. The mean WTP of direct users of the proposed program was Australian dollar (A$) 149 per annum (95% confidence interval of $102–$348). We conducted a cost–benefit analysis of the proposal, showing that the aggregate benefits are likely to outweigh the total costs of setting up and maintaining the database in the longer term. These findings are useful for resource allocation decisions regarding biological collections.

Keywords:

• value
• biological collections
• transaction costs
• contingent valuation

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the contributions of Judy West and Jim Croft, both from the Australian National Botanic Gardens. We would like to thank the management of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) project for helping to facilitate the survey of users of biological collections. We are especially grateful to Donald Hobern and Rob Palmer for helping to distribute the CV questionnaire amongst the current users of Australia's biological collections.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Biological collections have the property of being expensive to develop and maintain. It would be difficult and costly to collect again many of the species represented in museums and herbaria. Scoble (2002) estimated that a single specimen cost over $1300 to collect, catalogue, prepare and describe.

2. For example, Suarez and Tsutsui (2004) estimated that a typical research trip from the US to Argentina last about a month and cost over $5000 for airfare, car rental, food and accommodation and collecting biological materials.

3. For more details, interested readers should visit http://www.ala.org.au/.

4. For example, one can assume that the total number of users is 16,600 × 12 per year. The problem with this assumption is that there are most likely repeated users throughout the year. Table 6 reports the number of distinct users ‘per month’ but it does not guarantee that the ‘yearly’ (16,600 × 12) users will be distinct. We thank the reviewer for this observation.

5. For example, the European Natural History Specimen Information Network (ENHSIN) project was funded by the EU for 3 years (2000–2003). The ENHSIN project was then expanded into another EU funded project, BioCASE, which was supported over 4 years. Total EU support for collections infrastructure in seven EU countries amounted to €5.63 million in 2002 (Scoble 2002). The database is still available and accessible by users after nearly 14 years (see http://www.biocase.org/index.shtml).

6. A discount rate of 7% was used in the base-case calculation because rates between 3% and 10% are typically used by government departments in Australia (see Harrison 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, through the Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities (CERF) project. The work was conducted by the Environmental Economics Research Hub (EERH), with support from the Taxonomy Research and Information Network (TRIN).