Harvesting benefits from habitat restoration: Influence of landscape position on economic benefits to pheasant hunters

- We explore impact of landscapes on economic benefits from habitat restoration.
- We link hunter choice model to spatially-explicit ecological production function.
- Results show that benefits to hunters depend critically on selected restoration site.

The provision of ecosystem services via ecological restoration can be affected by the spatially explicit relationships between existing landscape characteristics and the proposed restoration. In such situations, effective economic targeting of restoration is aided by an accounting of the spatially explicit linkages between initial restoration actions, the resulting changes in ecosystem services, and the changes in economic benefits to individuals resulting from changes in the provision of ecosystem services. To this end, we examine the impact of landscape heterogeneity on economic benefits of USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) restoration for ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) hunters in Michigan by linking a previously developed ecological production function of ring-necked pheasant sightings to a recreation demand model of hunter site choice. Using proposed pheasant habitat restoration in Michigan as a framework for our analysis, we find that economic benefits generated by restoration depend critically upon the landscape selected for CRP restoration. Poorly targeted restoration sites yield near-zero economic benefits, while well-targeted investments yield about 2.4 times the economic benefits of the median parcel. The results show how managers can use both ecological and hunter behavior information to enhance the return on conservation investments.