Conservation and recreational values from semi-natural grasslands for visitors to two Italian parks

Abstract

According to integrated natural resources management, interrelated resources have to be managed by maintaining their environmental quality, and visitors are stakeholders who have to be involved in natural park management decisions. In this paper we simultaneously examine the conservation and recreational values from grasslands for visitors to two Italian Regional Parks. A contingent valuation survey was carried out in 2007 for estimating non-use benefits to visitors from a grasslands conservation project in these parks. Two scenarios were considered: the present landscape composed of grasslands and forests, and a hypothetical scenario of forests without grasslands. Respondents were asked the quality rating of the parks as places for recreational activities, and their willingness to donate (WTD) per year to a project for maintaining the status quo. Results show that the majority of respondents give a high rating to these parks, are in favour of the project implementation, and willing to donate mainly for the benefit of future generations. Among the WTD determinants, by estimating a Tobit model and a two-stage model, giving a high quality rating to the park for recreational activities corresponds to a higher WTD for grassland conservation. This seems to suggest that the recreational motivation tends to coincide with the need to conserve habitats and biodiversity, and that the decision maker should pay specific attention to the maintenance of the quality of the recreational activities as well as the maintenance of a diversified landscape in these parks.

Keywords:

• biodiversity conservation
• contingent valuation method
• demand function
• environmental valuation
• grasslands multi-functionality
• integrated natural resources management

Acknowledgements

The support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research, through PRIN 2005, is gratefully acknowledged. The authors wish to thank Antonella Galli (Manager of the Park of Suviana and Brasimone), Massimo Rossi (Manager of the Historical Park of Monte Sole) and Elena Ferrari for the material provided. Thanks are also due to Lucia Ferroni and Maria Cristina Mariani for their valuable help in carrying out the survey. Finally, the authors wish to thank two referees for their valuable comments and observations.

Notes

1. Semi-natural grasslands are of anthropic origin, and represent a habitat with a high level of specific biodiversity (plants and animals) as well as an example of sustainable use of natural resources. They contribute to the maintenance of a diversified landscape, otherwise dominated by woods. The Habitat Directive 92/42/EEC recognises that biodiversity maintenance may require the maintenance and, in some cases, the encouragement of human activities.

2. The Habitat Directive protects 231 European habitat types listed in the Annex I of the Directive. 71 of the 231 habitats are priority habitats, i.e. in danger of disappearance, for the conservation of which the EU has particular responsibility. The priority status of a habitat is indicated with an asterisk (*) before the habitat name (see Annex I).

3. In 2004–05 subsidies (by the Council of the Emilia-Romagna Region and the Province of Bologna) to farmers were about €17,600 for five parks in this region, amongst which are the Park of Monte Sole and the Park of the Lakes (Determinazione del Dir. Gen. n. 13857, 12/18/2002).

4. Respondents were not informed about the cost of the project, since at the time of the survey it was still under study.

5. An outlier is an observation that takes implausibly low or high values with reference to the rest of the data. They are identified through regression diagnostics (such as Studentised Residual, DFFITS, Cook's Distance and DFBETAS). Income is generally used as an independent variable in regression diagnostics.

6. For each respondent the inverse Mill's Ratio is calculated as follows (Heien and Wessels 1990):

• where z_i  = ( a ′ x _i  + βY_i )/σ, and φ (·) is the density function of the standard normal distribution.

7. With regard to the whole sample, the number of observations used for descriptive statistics is 295, while those used for regression analysis is 226.