Stated Preference Methods for Valuation of Forest Attributes

The valuation methods described in this chapter are based on the idea that forest ecosystems produce a wide variety of goods and services that are valued by people. Rather than focusing attention on the holistic value of forest ecosystems as is done in contingent valuation studies, attribute-based valuation methods (ABMs) focus attention on a set of attributes that have management or policy relevance (Adamowicz et al. 1998a, Bennett and Blarney 2001). The attribute set might include, for example, measures of biological diversity, areas designated for timber production or set aside for conservation, size of timber harvesting gaps, or watershed protection measures. If human-induced changes in forest ecosystems can be meaningfully represented by a set of attributes, choices made by survey respondents among sets of alternatives can provide resource managers and policy makers with detailed information about public preferences for many potential states of the environment. If price is included as an attribute of the problem, a multidimensional valuation surface can be estimated for use in cost/benefit analysis. In this chapter, we show how forest management systems can be modeled as sets of management attributes and how value tradeoffs among forest management attributes can be measured using survey methods. Because increasing public concern with the sustainable use of forest resources has placed forest management in the spotlight, we suggest using ABMs to provide public agencies with information relevant to the design of forest