Abstract

Large carnivores are keystone species but represent economic costs to hunters. In Sweden, carnivore territories generally overlap with hunting areas, and as a result, conflicts occur because of the competition for prey. The wolf, lynx, and brown bear are protected species by law but are hunted when authorities allocate license hunting quotas. The aim of these quotas is to limit carnivore numbers. We estimate a hedonic model using ordinary least squares to address the effect of large carnivore occurrence on hunting lease prices by accounting for the presence of license hunting quotas for predators. This result is compared with the least absolute deviation estimations, which reduce the influence of outliers in the survey data. To isolate the effect of carnivores on hunting lease prices, we use snow depth and forest productivity as proxy variables for game harvest in the absence of carnivores. Our results show that lynx and wolf presence reduce hunting lease prices, but lynx presence shows higher significance and robustness. Based on median regressions, the marginal implicit price of an additional wolf territory is about 15% larger than that of an additional lynx territory. In contrast, we found no conclusive evidence that bear abundance directly affects hunting lease prices, but regulated bear hunting is found to have a positive and significant impact on hunting leases, suggesting indirect positive net benefits of increased brown bear abundance.

Keywords

large carnivores; licensed carnivore-hunting; least absolute deviations; hunting lease prices; hedonic pricing

Published in

Journal of Forest Economics
2020, Volume: 35, number: 4, pages: 337-373

SLU Authors

• Lozano Galindez, Julian Eduardo

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Elofsson, Katarina

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Aarhus University
  • Södertörn University

• Persson, Jens

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Kjellander, Petter

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss


UKÄ Subject classification

Fish and Wildlife Management
Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Economics


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1561/112.00000518

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/107226