Resource Valuation Requirements in Strategic Fire Planning

Visitors to National Forests in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming were asked how their visitation rates would change with the presence of a high-intensity crown fire, prescribed fire, and a 20-yearold high-intensity fire at the area they were visiting. By using pairwise t-tests, visitors to forests in Colorado showed a statistically significant decrease in recreation trips per year with the presence of a recent crown fire, a smaller but still significant decrease with a recent prescribed burn, and with a 20-year-old high-intensity fire. A multivariate test of the effect of fire on the demand curve for recreation was conducted by using the travel cost method. The multivariate test indicates that years since last fire does have a statistically significant effect on visitation in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming, although the effect is very small. The growing societal awareness of maintaining a healthy environment and the rising costs of Federal and State fire fighting is forcing public agencies to incorporate the economic value of non-marketed resources into their fire management planning and decisions (González-Cabán 1993). However, estimating the impacts of fire on resources and the resulting economic consequences is a difficult problem for fire managers because of a lack of information on the effects of fire on recreation use. However, recreation is one of the dominant multiple uses in the intermountain west. Field users of the USDA Forest Service National Fire Management and Analysis System use the Resources Planning Act (RPA) values for recreation but do not have a solid empirical basis for determining how recreation use changes immediately after fire and over the recovery interval (Loomis 1997). Flowers and others (1985) found that "The studies demonstrate that no clear consensus has been reached on the duration for which fire effects on recreation should be measured or valued. The duration effects ranges from 6 months to 7 years among the studies.... The choice of duration is subjective and somewhat arbitrary because research on the question is scant" (p. 2). Flowers and others (1985) used an iterative bidding contingent valuation method question to estimate the change in value of recreation with low and high-intensity fires in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Although they found only minor effects, part of this may be due to baseline valuations elicited. Even in the no fire case their values per Recreation Visitor Day were less than $1, a value far below values in the literature at the time. These values were about half this amount immediately after fire, a sizeable percentage reduction. Use levels were estimated to fall by nearly half immediately after fire. Englin (1997) noted in his recent review of the literature on the effects of fire on recreation, "At present there are few studies quantifying the impacts of fire on the non-timber values produced by forests" (p. 16). Two revealed preference studies focus on the effects of fire on canoeing in the Canadian boreal forests (Boxall and others 1996, Englin and others 1996). A very recent master's thesis (Hilger 1998) applied a Poisson count data model to compare before and after recreation use levels with fire in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in Washington State. Hilger found a substantial drop-off in recreation use during the year of the An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the Symposium on Fire Economics, Policy, and Planning: Bottom Lines, April 5-9, 1999, San Diego, California. Professor, Department of Agri­ cultural and Resource Econom­ ics, Colorado StateUniversity, Fort Collins, CO 80523;e-mail: [email protected] Assistant Professor, Depart ment of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 98587; e-mail: [email protected] Economist, Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 4955 Canyon Crest Dr., Riverside, CA 92507; e-mail: agc/[email protected] USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-173. 1999. 199 Session V Fire Effects on Recreation Value---Loomis, Englin, González, Cabán fire and up to 2 years after the fire. However, by the third year use had surpassed the pre-fire use levels. The value per day of recreation did not change with the fire, however. The National Fire Management Analysis System (NFMAS) requires incorporation of fish, wildlife, recreation, and wilderness as well as environmental values into calculation of the dollar amount of net value change. Little guidance is available as to how field personnel are to estimate the change in recreation visitor days over time with different fire intensity levels. No information exists on recreation visitors reaction to prescribed fires that might be set to reduce the likelihood of high-intensity, crown fires. This paper begins to fill the gap by reporting empirical estimates of how recreation use and benefits change with different ages from fire and fire intensity levels. In addition, the similarity and differences between visitors' response to fire in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming is investigated to determine if the visitors reaction to fire from these three areas are similar enough that they might be generalized to other intermountain forests.