Valuing Environmental Assets on Rural Lifestyle Properties

摘要

Lifestyle landowners value land for its amenities and ecological characteristics and could play an important role in managing and conserving native vegetation in multifunctional rural landscapes. We quantify values of ecosystem services captured by owners of rural lifestyle properties in Victoria, Australia, using a spatial hedonic property price model. The value of ecosystem services provided by native vegetation is maximized when that vegetation occupies about 40 percent of the area of a lifestyleproperty. Since the current median proportion of native vegetation is 15 percent, most lifestyle landowners could benefit from increasing the area of native vegetation on their properties.