Recreation Valuation

This repository holds the data and code for projects related to US EPA's Office of Research and Development's effort to understand the economic value of coastal recreation and water quality. As work progresses, we will periodically update this space with new results and models. The projects contained are as follows:

• Valuing Coastal Beaches and Closures Using Benefit Transfer

  • We used readily-available information to develop two transferable models that, together, provide estimates for the value of a beach day as well as the lost value due to a beach closure. We modeled visitation for beaches in Barnstable, Massachusetts on Cape Cod through panel regressions to predict visitation by type of day, for the season, and for lost visits when a closure was posted. We used a meta-analysis of existing studies conducted throughout the United States to estimate a consumer surplus value of a beach visit of around $22 for our study area, accounting for water quality at beaches by using past closure history. We applied this value through a benefit transfer to estimate the value of a beach day, and combined it with lost town revenue from parking to estimate losses in the event of a closure. The results indicate a high value for beaches as a public resource and show significant losses to the town when beaches are closed due to an exceedance in bacterial concentrations.

  Lyon, Sarina F.; Merrill, Nathaniel H.; Mulvaney, Kate K.; and Mazzotta, Marisa J. (2018) "Valuing Coastal Beaches and Closures Using Benefit Transfer: An Application to Barnstable, Massachusetts," Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 1.https://doi.org/10.15351/2373-8456.1086

• Using Data Derived from Cellular Phone Locations to Estimate Visitation to Natural Areas: An Application to Water Recreation in New England, USA.

  • We introduce and validate the use of commercially-available datasets of human mobility based on cell phone locational data to estimate visitation to natural areas. By combining this data with on-the-ground observations of visitation to water recreation areas in New England, we fit a model to estimate daily visitation for four months to over 500 sites. The results show the potential for this new big data source of human mobility to overcome limitations in traditional methods of estimating visitation and to provide consistent information at policy-relevant scales. The high-resolution information in both space and time provided by cell phone location derived data creates opportunities for developing next-generation models of human interactions with the natural environment. However, the opaque and rapidly developing methods for processing locational information by the data providers required a calibration and validation against data collected by traditional means to confidently reproduce the desired estimates of visitation.

  Merrill, N.H., Atkinson, S.F., Mulvaney, K.K., Mazzotta, M.J. and Bousquin, J., 2020. Using data derived from cellular phone locations to estimate visitation to natural areas: An application to water recreation in New England, USA. PloS one, 15(4), p.e0231863. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231863

• Evaluating water quality impacts on visitation to coastal recreation areas using data derived from cell phone locations

  • Linking human behavior to environmental quality is critical for effective natural resource management. While it is commonly assumed that environmental conditions partially explain variation in visitation to coastal recreation areas across space and time, scarce and inconsistent visitation observations challenge our ability to reveal these connections. With the ubiquity of mobile phone usage, novel sources of digitally derived data are increasingly available at a massive scale. Applications of mobile phone locational data have been effective in research on urban-centric human mobility and transportation, but little work has been conducted on understanding behavioral patterns surrounding dynamic natural resources. We present an application of cell phone locational data to estimate the effects of beach closures, based on measured bacteria threshold exceedances, on visitation to coastal access points. Our results indicate that beach closures on Cape Cod, MA, USA have a significant negative effect on visitation at those beaches with closures, while closures at a sample of coastal access points elsewhere in New England have no detected impact on visitation. Our findings represent geographic mobility patterns for over 7 million unique coastal visits and suggest that closures resulted in approximately 1,800 (0.026%) displaced visits for Cape Cod during the summer season of 2017. We demonstrate the potential for human-mobility data derived from mobile phones to reveal the scale of use and behavior in response to changes in dynamic natural resources. Potential future applications of passively collected geocoded data to human-environmental systems are vast.

  Furey, R.P., Merrill, N.H., Sawyer, J.P., Mulvaney, K.K. and Mazzotta, M.J., 2022. Evaluating water quality impacts on visitation to coastal recreation areas using data derived from cell phone locations. Plos one, 17(4), p.e0263649. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263649

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