Valuing Protected Area Tourism Ecosystem Services Using Big Data

Economic value from protected areas informs decisions for biodiversity conservation and visitor benefits. Calculating these benefits assists governments to allocate limited budget resources. This study estimated tourism ecosystem service expenditure values for a regional protected area network in South Australia (57 parks) using direct transactional data, travel costs and economic multipliers. The big dataset came from a comprehensive booking system, which helped overcome common limitations associated with survey data (e.g., key areas rather than full network and high zero-value observations). Protected areas returned AU$373.8 million in the 2018–19 base year to the South Australian economy. The results indicate that combined estimation methods coupled to big data sets provide information on baseline expenditure to engage with critical conservation and tourism sites (e.g., Kangaroo Island). In this case they offer a unique full area network expenditure estimate which is an improvement on typical survey approaches, highlighting the advantage of protected area managers investing in big data. Finally, as South Australian protected areas exceed that in many other contexts the study offers important inputs to funding narratives and protected area expansion in line with global assessment targets.