Continued: "Estimating the Economic Value of Improved Trout Fishing on Wyoming Streams"

As promised previously, I am finally going to summarize and review the article “Estimating the Economic Value of Improved Trout Fishing on Wyoming Streams”.

Robert S. Dalton, Chris T. Bastian, James J. Jacobs and Thomas A. Wesche all collaborated to develop this article for the North American Journal of Fisheries Management.  It was in the November 1998 issue, pages 786-797.  Dalton et al. states in the opening paragraph “Although the demands placed on natural resources and the agencies that manage them are constantly increasing, the budgets necessary to meet these demands are often inadequate” (786).  This relates directly to my purpose of increasing fishing within the state of Wyoming in order to boost the revenue from fishing licenses to more sufficiently support the agencies. They quickly explain the difficulties of estimating the associated benefit of a fisheries improvement project and the related economic profit associated with such a program. This leads to the necessity of conducting surveys to estimate the benefit consumers gain from consuming a good or service, in this case fishing. Dalton et al. then go on to describe different methods that have been used to estimate the net willingness to pay for fishing by consumers. It is then concluded that CVM is the most adaptable non market assessment technique developed thus far. The CVM, Contingent Valuation Method, “uses survey questions to determine people’s preferences by finding out what they would be willing to pay for specified goods or services” (787). This technique has been used in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, on various streams and rivers, to estimate the economic value of fishing. They go on to define their research objective, their data collection methods (CVM), the economic model, analytical approach and their results. It was found that for the tourist anglers there was a much higher value added on the chance of catching a large trout than in comparison to resident anglers. In the end they conclude that their research can aid “fisheries management agencies to better compare different proposed improvement projects by using economic information” (796).

First of all I must state that I was completely engulfed in the article. It combined my knowledge of business, economics, and consumer behavior, and my limited understanding of biology with my love of fishing! It was awesome! Although this is something I want to pursue, until now I had never come across a true example of the merger of business and fishing.  As I may have mentioned before, I’m in my senior year of pursuing my degree in marketing. I’ve been striving to develop a way to combine my passion of fishing with my interest in marketing, and this article has shown me it is possible! I have not taken an economics class since freshman year, so some of the terminology and equations were a bit over my head at times, but once they defined the variables and I reviewed the concepts again it made more sense. They also included the scientific names of fish, which I found very interesting to find out that a rainbow trout is actually an Oncorhynchus mykiss. Although I can see how to the average reader it may be a bit overwhelming with how much in detail they dive into at times. They do use multiple references to support their surveying techniques which provide credibility to show they didn’t just create some random way to try to estimate an angler’s interpreted value of fishing. I have learned much about surveys and interpreting consumer value in my Consumer Behavior class so I thought it was really intriguing to see it applied to anglers and trout fishing.

Overall I found it a very interesting article and think it will support my argument for promoting fishing within the state of Wyoming.

P.S. The picture is from one of my fishing trips back in May near my grandfather's ranch.