Recreational and tourism value of healthy rivers

• The research seeks to determine whether improvements in riverine ecosystem health increase tourism and recreation visitation rates at locations across the Murray–Darling Basin.
• The report outlines the methodology to develop metrics of monthly birdwatcher and photographer visitation count at sub-catchment scale as Birder user Days (BuDs) from geo-located, time stamped bird species sighting lists posted to the eBird citizen science platform, and Photo user Days (PuDs) derived from geo-located, time stamped photo posts to the Flickr photo posting web site.
• This report provides the results of the initial research project.

Plain English Summary of Recreational and tourism value of healthy rivers

• This document is a plain language statement that summarises the investigation into the relationship between the ecological health of rivers, wetlands, and lakes in the Murray–Darling Basin and the frequency of tourism and recreational visits to these areas. 

Extension A - The recreational and tourism value of healthy rivers (Oct 2024)

• Using the travel cost method, this research investigated the use of citizen science data to estimate consumer surplus associated with birdwatcher visits to 2 hot spot sites in the Murray–Darling Basin: the Coorong and Gunbower-Koondrook-Pericoota.
• Consumer surplus per visit is an important metric because, when combined with records of visitor numbers, it reports the ‘added value’ a recreation site delivers to visitors, over and above the costs incurred in visiting.
• The net value visitors obtain from visiting a recreation site can be used in social cost benefit analysis (Boardman et al., 2001) to explore whether the benefits from increased visitation exceed the costs incurred in modifying site management or enhancing site condition to attract additional visitors. 

Extension B - The recreational and tourism value of healthy rivers (Feb 2025) 

• The study utilised bird species checklists posted on the eBird citizen science platform as a proxy to estimate birdwatcher visitation rates across the Basin.  
• Monthly BuD and PuD counts for 3170 sub-catchments, grouped into 28 River Regions, are collated over 73 months from March 2013 to March 2019. This produces data sets of more than 119,000 data points for BuDs and more than 37,000 data points for PuDs.
• This research has shown that eBird-derived BuDs show real promise as a metric of visitation rate that is available across the whole of the Basin. However, a major challenge remains in identifying better metrics of riparian environmental condition that can be applied across the whole Basin.
• This body of research found a significant positive association between wet surface area and monthly BuD counts for sub-catchments in the Border Rivers, Macquarie Bogan, Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, Murray Riverina and Upper Mallee River Regions.

Extension A

• Volunteered geographic information from bird species siting lists posted to the eBird citizen science platform shows promise as a data source for estimating the consumer surplus birdwatchers obtain from visiting recreation sites in the Basin.
• Three particular challenges were identified in the exploration:
  • high levels of data attrition reduce the size of regression datasets and decrease the precision of consumer surplus estimates
  • the absence of direct information on individual-specific socio-demographics and behaviour of visitors
  • the absence of information on the number of visitors who travel in a group, which may lead to inflated per person estimates of consumer surplus.
• We suggest how each of these challenges might be addressed by modifying data collation and analysis methodologies to make best use of the scale and cost efficiency advantages of this kind of data, as compared with data collected by on-site surveys or via whole-of-population online surveys. These suggestions provide several opportunities for further research.