Publication Date:
2019-03-12
Description:
© The Authors, 2019. This is the author's version of the work and is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. The definitive version was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, 140, (2019):364-373, doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2018.12.047.
Description:
Estuaries provide significant cultural ecosystem services, including recreation and tourism. Disruptions of estuarine biogeochemical processes resulting from environmental degradation could interrupt the flow of these services, reducing benefits and diminishing the welfare of local communities. This study focused on recreational shellfishing in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts (41.55°N, 70.80°W). Relationships among measures of recreational shellfishing, estuarine water quality, and local socioeconomic conditions were tested to understand how the benefits of cultural ecosystem services to local communities might be affected by declining water quality. Transferring estimated economic benefits from an analysis of nearby municipalities, the study finds that increases in Chl a during the 24-year period were associated with losses in recreational shellfishing benefits of $0.08–0.67 million per decade. The approach presented here suggests a more broadly applicable framework for assessing the impacts of changes in coastal ecosystem water quality on the welfare of local communities.
Description:
We would like to thank the Buzzards Bay Coalition, the Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program, and the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries for providing data for this analysis. We thank the 1074 citizen volunteers of the Buzzards Bay Coalition who collected the water quality samples and Mark Rasmussen for his leadership in sustaining the Baywatchers Program. Support for this analysis was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Grant no. 14-106159-000-CFP), MIT Sea Grant (subaward number 5710004045), the Johnson Endowment of the WHOI Marine Policy Center, and SCD acknowledges support from the University of Virginia.
Keywords:
Estuarine water quality
;
Eutrophication
;
Recreational shellfishing
;
Cultural ecosystem services
;
Economic benefits transfer
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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