A Conjoint Analysis Applied to Value the Biodiversity of Xu Chu Kang Wetland in Taiwan Taoyuan

• Main Authors: Huang, Jheng-Ren, 黃政仁
• Other Authors: Chien, Yu-Lan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/38527362849417383523

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 自然資源與環境管理研究所 === 102 === The biodiversity is related to not only the sustainability of ecosystems, but also the survival of mankinds. Since the industrial revolution, accompanying by human’s economic activities and wasteful lifestyles, the global biodiversity is declining rapidly. In order to convey and persuade people to conserve biodiversity, scientists constantly try very hard to find ways to evaluate the biodiversity. A comprehensive definition of the biodiversity is indicated by the different genes and species of the living beings, and the ecosystem for them to live in. Compared with species evenness and ecosystems, the species richness (the number of species) is relatively easy to be measured, the prvious studies in literature maily focused on the species richness instead. In this study, we choose the Xu Chu Kang wetland in Taiwan Taoyuan as a study site. Not only is it classified as a national wetland and an important bird habitats in the northwest coast of Taiwan, but also it is faced tremendous incrasing threats both from the pollution of the adjacent industrial area and the government’s recent development plan of the Taoyuan-Air-City. This paper aims to evaluate the biodiversity by applying the conjoint analysis method and choice experiments. In order to improve the shortcomings on oversimplifying the concept of biodiversity in previous studies, we carried out several improvements in the survey design as follows: (1) dividing wetland birds into general birds and protected birds based on their conservation importance; (2) introducing birds’ species evenness as an attribute of biodiversity; (3) incorporating the concept of ecosystem diversity as an attribute of biodiversity. The type of wetland ecosystem is then classified as the intertidal zone, the marsh, and the swamp (mangroves) based on Xu Chu Kang’s status quo. In addition, this study also assesses how the elicition methods in conjoint analysis method (scoring, ranking) and choice experiments (best choice), that the correspndents use to express thir preference for diffent conservation choices, affect the valuation of biodiversity. After a stratified random sampling with the equal probabilities principle and a three-stage sampling design, we had gotten valid surveys for 302 national residents and 250 local residents. After analyzing the data, we conclude the following: (1) About half the people across the country heard biodiversity. (2) People prefer higher biodiversity. In terns of different biodiversity attributes, people prefer benthic organisms attribute first, bird species richness attribute next, bird species evenness third, and wetland type attribute last. The results suggested that people have a complete concept of biodiversity, perhaps because people’s prior knowledge or interviewer's instruction card quide them to elicit their preference for biodiversity attributes. (3) The marging willingness to pay (MWTP) curves of the general birds are consistent with the law of diminishing marginal benefit. In contrast, the MWTP curves of the protected birds are not all consistent with the law of diminishing marginal benefit. (4) With limited numbers of samples, ranking method does take into account the fineness of data and the problem of information load. (5) People who have more knowledge about biodiversity will pay more attention to the bird species richness and the benthic attribute.