Site preferences and participation of waterbird recreationists: Using choice modelling to inform habitat management

Abstract Recreationists utilizing wetland birds for hunting or birdwatching contribute significantly to local economies and conservation efforts. The waterfowl management community, through the 2012 North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP), has explicitly recognized the need to increase recruitment and retention of wetland bird recreationists to help halt the national decline in social support for conservation. Achieving this goal requires that waterfowl and wetland managers consider how recreation site characteristics and management impact participation and support for wetland conservation. The outdoor recreation management and natural resource economics fields have extensive experience with similar problems and frequently use recreational site choice models to link attributes of recreational areas to use by recreationists. The waterfowl management community has several publicly available, long-term data sets that can be used in site choice models. We introduce U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service waterfowl harvest survey data, U.S. Geological Survey band encounter data, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology eBird data and use those data to summarize travel characteristics of wetland bird enthusiasts. We used harvest survey and eBird data in choice models to predict and compare the impacts of three seemingly similar proposed habitat acquisitions on use by recreationists in the state of Georgia; the proposal that had the greatest increase in predicted trips would result in twice as many additional hunting trips and >10 times more additional birdwatching trips than the proposal that generated the fewest additional trips. This case study demonstrates the potential of these and similar data and analytical methods for incorporating recreation participation and site preferences into habitat planning and delivery under the NAWMP. We encourage the outdoor recreation management and economics communities and the waterfowl management community to build partnerships and cooperative projects to improve our understanding of the relationships between wetland bird users and habitat conservation. Management implications • Results from our site choice models can provide a natural and intuitive metric that can be used to evaluate the relative merits of alternative management actions in achieving social objectives. An improvement over current proposals evaluated on a qualitative description of public access might be achieved through using the choice modeling approach to obtain quantitative estimates of the expected increase in public use resulting from a proposal. • Future research efforts that utilize finer resolution recreation site choice information would allow for a better understanding of recreationists’ decision processes and could provide managers with valuable insights into the benefits of quality improvements at state parks, managed areas, and other management units of interest. • Researchers should also work with state agencies to identify sources of finer resolution site characteristic data, such as the distribution and availability of public land, recreational regulations, and presence of infrastructure. • Researchers should explore interdisciplinary collaborations with ecological modelers to model expected sightings or expected harvest as a function of spatially-explicit environmental and landscape characteristics. Such a model could then be linked to a recreation site choice model, allowing the tracing of wetland restoration/enhancement benefits through a change in the biological system, and ultimately the change in trip locations, total trips, and/or economic benefits. • We encourage the natural resource management and economics professionals to build partnerships and cooperative projects with the NAWMP community to improve our understanding of the preferences, participation, and motivation of wetland bird users and their relationships to habitat conservation and management.