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The non-market benefits of early and partial gains in managing threatened salmon.

ABSTRACT: Threatened species are increasingly dependent on conservation investments for persistence and recovery. Information that resource managers could use to evaluate investments-such as the public benefits arising from alternative conservation designs-is typically scarce because conservation benefits arise outside of conventional markets. Moreover, existing studies that measure the public benefits of conserving threatened species often do not measure the benefits from partial gains in species abundance that fall short of official recovery, or the benefits from achieving gains in species abundance that happen earlier in time. We report on a stated preference choice experiment designed to quantify the non-market benefits for conservation investments aimed at threatened Pacific Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) along the Oregon Coast (OC). Our results show that a program aimed at increasing numbers of returning salmon can generate sizable benefits of up to $518 million/y for an extra 100,000 returning fish, even if the species is not officially declared recovered. Moreover, while conservation investment strategies expected to achieve relatively rapid results are likely to have higher up-front costs, our results show that the public attaches substantial additional value of up to $277 million/y for achieving conservation goals quickly. Our results and approach can be used to price natural capital investments that lead to gains in returning salmon, and as inputs to evaluations of the benefits and costs from alternative conservation strategies.

SUBMITTER: Lewis DJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6693736 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The non-market benefits of early and partial gains in managing threatened salmon.

Lewis David J DJ Dundas Steven J SJ Kling David M DM Lew Daniel K DK Hacker Sally D SD

PloS one 20190814 8

Threatened species are increasingly dependent on conservation investments for persistence and recovery. Information that resource managers could use to evaluate investments-such as the public benefits arising from alternative conservation designs-is typically scarce because conservation benefits arise outside of conventional markets. Moreover, existing studies that measure the public benefits of conserving threatened species often do not measure the benefits from partial gains in species abundan ...[more]

PMID: 31412046

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Project description:Evaluations of human impacts on Earth's ecosystems often ignore evolutionary changes in response to altered selective regimes. Freshwater habitats for Snake River fall Chinook salmon (SRFCS), a threatened species in the US, have been dramatically changed by hydropower development and other watershed modifications. Associated biological changes include a shift in juvenile life history: Historically essentially 100% of juveniles migrated to sea as subyearlings, but a substantial fraction have migrated as yearlings in recent years. In contemplating future management actions for this species should major Snake River dams ever be removed (as many have proposed), it will be important to understand whether evolution is at least partially responsible for this life-history change. We hypothesized that if this trait is genetically based, parents who migrated to sea as subyearlings should produce faster-growing offspring that would be more likely to reach a size threshold to migrate to sea in their first year. We tested this with phenotypic data for over 2,600 juvenile SRFCS that were genetically matched to parents of hatchery and natural origin. Three lines of evidence supported our hypothesis: (i) the animal model estimated substantial heritability for juvenile growth rate for three consecutive cohorts; (ii) linear modeling showed an association between juvenile life history of parents and offspring growth rate; and (iii) faster-growing juveniles migrated at greater speeds, as expected if they were more likely to be heading to sea. Surprisingly, we also found that parents reared a full year in a hatchery produced the fastest growing offspring of all-apparently an example of cross-generational plasticity associated with artificial propagation. We suggest that SRFCS is an example of a potentially large class of species that can be considered to be "anthro-evolutionary"-signifying those whose evolutionary trajectories have been profoundly shaped by altered selective regimes in human-dominated landscapes.

Dataset Information

The non-market benefits of early and partial gains in managing threatened salmon.

Publications

The non-market benefits of early and partial gains in managing threatened salmon.

Similar Datasets

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