Using a residency index to estimate the economic value of coastal habitat provisioning services for commercially important fish species
Author(s)
McCormick, Hannah
Salguero-Gomez, Roberto
Mills, Morena
Davis, Katrina
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Coastal habitats worldwide face various threats, including sea level rise and land conversion. Coastal habitat loss has important economic consequences, as many of these habitats provide valuable ecosystem services including flood protection, carbon sequestration, and nursery areas for commercially fished species. Quantifying the economic value of these ecosystem services helps target policies for coastal habitat restoration. Here, we demonstrate how to quantify the contribution made by coastal habitats to the revenue (e.g., ex-vessel values) of commercially fished species by estimating a residency index. This residency index weights the relative importance of a habitat along a species' lifecycle by explicitly incorporating the target species' life histories and the estimated proportion of time the species spends in that habitat at different life stages. We demonstrate how this method can be used to estimate the value of saltmarsh to UK commercial fisheries landings. This analysis suggests that UK saltmarsh contributes annually between 15% and 17.5% of total UK commercial landings for European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax), European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa), and Common sole (Solea solea). Our findings support an economic argument for saltmarsh protection and restoration. Furthermore, our approach provides a general framework that integrates demographic methods and economic analyses to assess the value of saltmarsh and other coastal habitats for fisheries worldwide.
Date Issued
2021-05-01
Date Acceptance
2021-01-02
Citation
Conservation Science and Practice, 2021, 3 (5)
ISSN
2578-4854
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
Conservation Science and Practice
Volume
3
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Authors. Conservation Science and Practice published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000620707600001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=a2bf6146997ec60c407a63945d4e92bb
Subjects
BASS DICENTRARCHUS-LABRAX
Biodiversity & Conservation
Biodiversity Conservation
ecosystem services
ENGLAND
fisheries
HARVEST
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
MODEL
PATTERNS
residency index
saltmarsh
SALT-MARSH
SCIENCE
Science & Technology
SEAGRASS
United Kingdom
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e363
Date Publish Online
2021-02-23