Valuation of ecological services of Chaldarreh Forest Park in Tonekabon County, Iran using choice experiment method

Investigating community preferences about natural forest parks ecological services and determining their economic value is a useful method for planning and managing them. The purpose of this study is to the economic valuation of Chaldarreh Forest Park ecological services in Tonekabon County, Mazandaran province, Iran. Research data were collected by field survey, and random sampling by completing a Choice Experiment questionnaire by 135 visitors to Chaldarreh Forest Park. In this study, the willingness to pay of individuals for forest ecosystem conservation was estimated by the Choice Experiment method and conditional logit model. Also, a multinomial logit model was used to investigate the effect of socioeconomic variables on the willingness to pay. In this study, willingness to pay each household for the conservation of ecological services in the region, including the attributes of plant species conservation, animal species conservation, water protection and soil protection from the status quo to the improvement situation, respectively, equal to 21560.15, 15880.47, 47440.6 and 21180.85 Iranian rials per month have been estimated. Water protection was the most important ecological attribute of Chaldarreh Forest Park known to the respondents. Also, the final willingness to pay each household for the conservation of ecological services of Chaldarreh Forest Park was estimated to be 106080.07 Rials per month.