Management of high-profile wildlife species can be complicated. On one hand, some species inflict costs on humans through conflicts like property damages, livestock depredations, and injuries. On the other hand, the same species can generate immense value to society: people like viewing wildlife and benefit from wildlife contributions to ecosystem health. To evaluate wildlife management policies, a manager would ideally be able to compare costs and benefits in an apples-to-apples way. If a policy were expected to change the number of animals in the wild, would society be better off or worse off? Said differently, would the change in benefits overshadow the change in costs? Economic costs can be relatively straightforward to quantify. For example, data may indicate that a species kills a certain number of livestock per year, and livestock are priced in markets. So, one could multiply the number of livestock lost by the market price of livestock to estimate overall cost. Benefits, however, can be trickier to quantify, in part because there are not market prices for many important types of benefits. Managers of parks and protected areas around the world are often tasked with communicating the economic value derived from those areas, even though there are no associated prices. For example, there is no market price that directly reveals how much people are willing to pay for a wildlife sighting – but just because such a price does not exist, that does not mean there is no value from that sighting!

That’s where economists come in. Using a method called “nonmarket valuation,” they can help managers estimate and communicate the value of goods and services that are not traded in traditional economic markets. 

To address the gap, economists from the National Park Service (NPS) and USGS collaborated on an approach to quantify multiple types of benefits from wildlife viewing: the value of an individual wildlife viewing trip, the value of an individual animal sighting, the aggregate value from all animal sightings over the course of a year, and an individual animal’s contribution to aggregate sighting value. The latter measure is key: individual animals generate a continuous stream of viewing benefits, and that entire stream is lost if an individual animal is lost. The economists applied their approach to grizzly and black bear viewing in Yellowstone National Park, where bear viewing is a highly popular draw for visitors, thereby creating measures of bear benefits that can be weighed against existing estimates of costs imposed by bears. 

“What we've done is tried to quantify just one small piece of the total economic value of bears, by estimating a `use’ value from bear sightings. The entire total value of bears would be higher, especially if one accounted for ‘non-use’ values like existence value.  As more types of values get filled in over time, we’ll continue to have a better picture of how much society benefits from bears” (Aaron Enriquez, Research Economist, USGS).