Evaluation of potential recreational benefits of Satoyama forest [country side forest]: Using GIS and benefit transfer

The forest near paddies and village is called satoyama forest, which was historically utilized by local people. They had gathered fire wood, edible plants and undergrowth as fertilizer. The coexistence of human and nature had supported rich bio-diversity. However, most of satoyama forests are nowadays being abandoned and the biodiversity is declined by the modernization in people's life styles and agricultural activities. We consider satoyama forests should be utilized as recreation sites where people can enjoy hiking, gathering edible plants and so on. Then public authorities must play an important part in those programs because recreational forests have public good nature. So we have some questions. (1) How much benefits do these programs bring? (2) Which satoyama forest should be utilized? (3) What kind of recreational utilization form is suitable? We evaluated potential recreational benefits for an about 60ha forest compartments in southern part of Kyoto prefecture. There are 591 satoyama forest compartments in the study area. Firstly, we conducted two separate valuation studies on satoyama forest with supposing two recreational utilization forms. CVM was used to evaluate willingness of local residents to pay for preserving open-access community forest and willingness of urban visitors to pay for entrance fee of recreational forest. We also formulated relationships between visit rates and access distance zones. As access distance increased, WTPs and visit rates were decreased in both studies. Secondly, those WTPs and visit rates were transferred to other unutilized satoyama forest compartments. GIS population map was used to estimate potential WTPs and numbers of visitors corresponding to access distance zones. And the potential recreational benefits were estimated with aggregating WTPs spatially. Lastly, distributions of the potential recreational benefits were displayed on GIS maps. The results are followings: (1) There are numbers of satoyama forests which can expect higher benefits than the satoyama forests already utilized for recreation. (2) Which satoyama forest should be utilized for recreation was displayed by the GIS maps. (3) The open-access community forest should be located in the area where population density is high, but as for the recreational forest, distribution of population cannot be as the important requirement of location.