How do wildfires affect recreation patterns?

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The occurrence of large wildfires is an increasing feature of the American West. Despite this, little is known about how these fires affect welfare-relevant outcomes like recreation demand because of the cost of conducting such analyses at a large scale. In this paper, I use the number of photos uploaded to Flickr between 2006-2013 as a costless and scalable proxy for visits to National Parks and Forests in California. Using this dataset, I examine the effect of fires of different sizes, severities, and ages on recreation demand in forests with different types of vegetation over a 30-year period. I find that a fire of average size and severity causes a 9.9% reduction in visits in the long run. Second, the response function of recreation demand to fire occurrence over time is non-monotonic; results suggest that visits drop in response to fires initially, gradually increase, and then drop again towards the end of the 30-year period. Third, while the number of visitors drops in response to fires of all severity levels momentarily, it recovers faster in sites that were burned more severely relative to sites that had milder fires. Lastly, the effect of a wildfire on recreation varies dramatically depending on the vegetation type of a site.

Type of resource	text
Date created	[ca. May 1, 2019]

Author	Jain, Mansi

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/qz945mm9567

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Mansi Jain (May 2019). How do wildfires affect recreation patterns? Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/qz945mm9567

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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