Multi-species, multi-country analysis reveals North Americans are willing to pay for transborder migratory species conservation

[摘要] 1. Migratory species often provide ecosystem service benefits to people in onecountry while receiving habitat support in other countries. The multinationalcooperation that could help ensure continued provisioning of these benefitsby migration may be informed by understanding the economic values people in different countries place on the benefits they derive from migratorywildlife.2. We conducted contingent valuation surveys to estimate the willingness of 3733respondents from Canada, the United States and México to invest in conservation for two disparate migratory species, the northern pintail duck Anas acutaand the Mexican free-tailed bat Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana.3. With zero-inflated mixed-effects negative binomial regression (explaining 87%of the variation in willingness to pay for conservation), we found that respondents from each nation, after controlling for both household income and per capita national Gross Domestic Product, were willing to invest in conservation inother countries.4. This willingness to pay for conservation, even when respondents knew thatfunds would be used to support benefits accruing primarily in other countries,demonstrates the potential for support of multinational conservation policiesand programmes that direct resources to locations where the most critical habitat is located, rather than where the funding is generated. These findings couldbe used to support the development or expansion of new and existing international conservation programmes for migratory species.

[学科分类] 护理学

[关键词] animal migration;contingent valuation;cross-boundary governance;Mexican free-tailed bat;multinational biodiversity management;nature’s benefit to people;northern pintail duck