Do Sportfish Consumption Advisories Affect Reservoir Anglers’ Site Choice?

Abstract

Increasing numbers of freshwater ecosystems have had sportfish consumption advisories posted in recent years. Advisories are sometimes issued in lieu of environmental remediation if they are considered more cost-effective than “cleaning up” the resource, but this approach assumes that anglers adjust behavior in response to the warning. Previous studies, however, suggest that compliance with advisories can be quite low. In contrast, this study measures a statistically significant response by reservoir anglers to consumption advisories. In particular, anglers are less likely to choose to visit a reservoir with an advisory than a similar reservoir without an advisory. Furthermore, the economic losses due to advisories are quantified for anglers in two regions of Tennessee.

Handling unobserved site characteristics in random utility models of recreation demand

“…The dummy variable is intended to capture this distinction.'' Jakus et al [8] include dummies for two sites with the largest shares of trips. Parsons and Needelman [14] include a group specific constant for sites in northern Wisconsin with the explanation ''Lakes in the north are more often in a wilderness setting and many are in a state or national forest with the protection of natural amenities that such a designation provides.''…”

“…e ijt , which represents idiosyncratic tastes of an individual on a particular choice occasion for a particular location, is the usual iid draw from an extreme value distribution. 8 Assuming that b i is fixed across individuals (b) leads to the familiar conditional logit model and retaining the i subscript on b yields the random parameters logit (RPL). 9 For a site choice model, the usual choice probabilities 10 are given by Eq.…”

“…Identification issues arise because increasing eitherb or s b increases ARTICLE IN PRESS 8 The data available for this study include multiple observations of individual anglers. This is likely to introduce correlations in the assumed iid error e ijt .…”

Valuing water quality changes using a bioeconomic model of a coastal recreational fishery

“…Many of these studies use measures of catch rates as site attributes, but only a few include measures of both catch rates and water quality. Examples include Jakus et al [18,19], who use the presence of fish consumption advisories and average catch rates as site characteristics, and Kaoru [20], who uses estimates of nitrogen and phosphorus discharge, biochemical oxygen demand, and suspended solids, along with a measure of average catch.…”

Reservoir Area of Influence and Implications for Fisheries Management

“…The research of motives and site-selection behavior is common in recreational fisheries (Jakus et al 1997;Schramm et al 2003;Hunt 2005;Sutton and Ditton 2005;Carlin et al 2012;Aas and Onstad 2013;De Freitas et al 2013). One important component highlighted in the research on site selection is the importance of travel distances (Arlinghaus and Mehner 2004).…”