How do wildfires affect recreation patterns?
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.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date created | [ca. May 1, 2019] |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Jain, Mansi |
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Subjects
Subject | wildfires |
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Subject | Flickr |
Subject | social media |
Subject | Stanford Economics |
Subject | thesis |
Subject | econometrics |
Subject | recreation |
Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Mansi Jain (May 2019). How do wildfires affect recreation patterns? Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/qz945mm9567
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- mansij56@gmail.com
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