Public attitudes and willingness to pay toward the conservation of Crested Ibis: Insights for management

In order to better design conservation programs to conserve threatened species, social, economic and political factors must be carefully considered. The wild population of the endangered Crested Ibis (Nipponia nippon) is currently only distributed in Yangxian County, Shaanxi province of China, and as the gradual dispersal of its population from the mountains to the plains, the possibility of human-wildlife interaction has increased, which poses certain challenges for conservation and management. Here, we used a questionnaire to investigate public attitudes and willingness to pay (WTP) toward Crested Ibis conservation, and to evaluate relevant influencing factors, with a view to providing recommendations for its management. The results showed that local residents strongly support the conservation of ibis and factors like education level, income, residential area, perception for ibis and prior experiences significantly affected their support for conservation. Results also indicated that the annual WTP was US$18.28 per household, and the potential value of donations is about US$2.45 million per year for Crested Ibis conservation. Regression analysis indicated that income, perception for ibis, prior experience, support for conservation and environmental attitudes had a significant effect on WTP. The comparison between the original research value of the ibis and the predicted value from the Meta-regression analysis function indicated that the benefit transfer values are able to inform policy decisions. Our results can be applied not only to the design of tailored outreach programs and management policies for the Crested Ibis, but also to facilitate conservation and management of other endangered species by encouraging decision makers to use benefit transfer models for the rapid valuation in the absence of species economic information.