Wildfire and the Economic Value of Wilderness Recreation

The idea that wildfires play an integral role in maintaining healthy forests has begun to change the ways that scientists, managers, and the general public view fire policy and programs. New approaches to forest management that seek to integrate natural disturbances with the provision of goods and services valued by people impose a greater need for a full accounting of the economic effects of wildfire (as well as other disturbances). In addition to the effects that forest fires have on commodities and assets that are traded in markets, such as timber and residential structures, fires also affect the condition and value of public goods that are not traded in markets, such as outdoor recreational sites. Understanding the economic consequences of wildfires on the provision and value of public goods requires the use of non-market valuation methods (Champ et al. 2003). The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how wildfires affect the demand for, and value of, Wilderness recreational sites, which is illustrated using the travel cost method.

The next section of this chapter describes several conceptual issues faced by researchers who seek to evaluate the impact of wildfires on forest recreation, and how these issues have been treated in the literature. This is followed by a brief, but technical, presentation of the theoretical and econometric models used in our subsequent empirical analysis. The methods used to collect and organize a largescale data set, spanning more than 2.5 million acres of Wilderness, 15 years of Wilderness use, and 60 years of fire history, are then described. This is followed by a presentation and discussion of the empirical results. The chapter concludes with some remarks about the limitations and potential extensions of the analysis, and a discussion of how recreation demand modeling can help land managers make more informed decisions.