Developing economic indices to assess the human dimensions of the South Florida coastal marine ecosystem services

Resource managers in South Florida are aware that coastal and marine ecosystems provide food, recreation, and a quality of life that are highly-valued by humans. Estimates of economic values in Florida, such as willingness-to-pay for a day of coral reef snorkeling or the change in this value from a change in coral cover, are not updated in a timely manner or are not available at all. Usually these studies are baseline studies that provide a snapshot of economic values under existing economic and environmental conditions. Therefore, to be useful to ecosystems management, human dimension (HD) economic indicators that are relatively easy to measure each year must be identified. In addition, they must be combined with a conceptual model that links these indicators to the ecosystem services; their relevant economic values; the HD non-economic metrics of well-being; and the quality and/or quantity of the environmental and ecologic attributes associated with the ecosystem service. Carefully selected HD economic indicators together with ecological, environmental, and non-economic human dimensions indicators can provide a rich source of information for managing the long term conservation and use of coastal and marine ecosystems. In this paper, we specify criteria for selecting HD economic indicators that measure the change in demand for ecosystem services resulting from changes in the quality or quantity of the environmental attributes that comprise the service. We assessed a suite of candidate metrics and arrived at a final set of HD economic indicators for further evaluation. These HD economic indicators are the percentage change from year to year in: (1) coastal park visitation; (2) number of registered recreational boats; (3) pounds of commercial seafood landed; (4) number of live marine organisms landed; and (5) dollar value of insured flood damage claims paid. We illustrated the use of these HD economic indicators with an empirical example for the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas where the indicators are measured over a one year period. The changes were then scored and the scores were assigned a stop light rating of: green for good (or increasing), yellow for fair (or stable), and red for poor (or decreasing). Our empirical illustration of HD economic indicators offers a first step in developing metrics to rate the status of Florida's coastal and marine ecosystem services. The next steps are to propose a full suite of candidate HD economic indicators and metrics; final selection of HD economic indicators and their integration into the conceptual model; annual calculation of these indicators and their evaluation; and environmental/ecosystem assessment. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.