Wetland Quality as a Determinant of Economic Value of Ecosystem Services: an Exploration

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of including wetland quality in valuation studies and introduces a method to incorporate it into meta-analyses for more accurate ecosystem service valuation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to include wetland quality as a factor in meta-analysis, addressing a gap in previous valuation studies.

Findings

Wetland quality significantly affects ecosystem service values.

A new meta-regression model incorporating wetland quality improves valuation accuracy.

Relative wetland state measures can serve as proxies for quality in analyses.

Abstract

Wetland quality is a critical factor in determining values of wetland goods and services. However, in many studies on wetland valuation, wetland quality has been ignored. While those studies might give useful information to the local people for decision-making, their lack of wetland quality information may lead to the difficulty in integrating wetland quality into a cross-studies research like meta-analysis. In a meta-analysis, a statistical regression function needs withdrawing from those individual studies for analysis and prediction. This research introduces the wetland quality factor, a critical but frequently missed factor, into a meta-analysis and simultaneously considers other influential factors, such as study method, socio-economic state and other wetland site characteristics, as well. Thus, a more accurate and valid meta-regression function is expected. Due to no obvious quality information in primary studies, we extract two kinds of wetland states from the study context as relative but globally consistent quality measurement to use in the analysis, as the first step to explore the effect of wetland quality on values of ecosystem services.