Essays on heterogeneity in outdoor recreation demand and climate change’s impact on agriculture

This dissertation presents three chapters related to problems in natural resource management, namely, recreation demand, park management, and climate change impacts on the agriculture sector. The first essay quantifies the response of tourists to increasing wildfire activities in 32 national parks across the western United States. Results from a large-scale analysis show that wildfires will on average reduce annual visitation by about 1.35% each year, which is about a half of the estimates suggested by previous literature. In addition, I find the majority of the visitation losses caused by wildfires are attributed to emergency fire closures, and national park visitors, comprised of both day users and campers, who are surprisingly resilient to smoky conditions. The second essay investigates the possibility of applying Temporal Disaggregation to SafeGraph’s daily foot traffic data to downscale the monthly visitation to 31 western national parks to the daily scale. Using a grid search design to achieve the best model performance, my results confirm the applicability of SafeGraph data to downscale monthly visitation for the majority of the parks in my sample. Overall, the approach proposed in this study provides an opportunity for park managers to reconstruct daily visitor use data and be better equipped for adaptive management in national parks. The third essay examines how the choice of grouping can affect expected future agricultural profits when one wants to quantify the heterogeneous impacts of climate change on agriculture. The results indicate that accounting for grouping uncertainty greatly increases the confidence interval around projected climate impacts. In addition, I do not find that one type of grouping is superior to any other. I suggest two potential solutions and emphasize the importance of explicitly controlling for grouping uncertainty in future studies.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural & Applied Econ

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Cai, Chang

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gramig, Benjamin
• Ando, Amy
• Christensen, Peter
• van Riper, Carena

• spatial heterogeneity
• outdoor recreation
• nature-based tourism
• national park
• visitor use management
• wildfire
• location-based data
• temporal disaggregation
• climate change
• agriculture

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Chang Cai

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116052

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116052