Background:

Despite that urban ecosystems are exceptionally important in providing services with direct impact on people’s health, security, and recreation, policy makers had largely overlooked their relevance. Nonmarket valuation of urban ecosystems is useful to inform costbenefit analyses -which is particularly pressing in developing world cities, where peri-urban forests are deteriorated. We estimate the recreational value of Desierto de los Leones National Park and Dinamos Park -two peri-urban recreational sites near Mexico City.

Methods:

We implement the Travel Cost Method which estimates the use value of a recreational site by inferring the annual demand for trips to such site. Demand estimation is carried out via latent class count models (LCCM) to control for the heterogeneity in preferences suggested by the presence of large number of visits from a subgroup of visitors.

Results:

Desierto de los Leones receives two types of visitors, each type assigning recreational values of 2008 USD 33 and USD 12 per trip. The weighted average recreational value of Desierto amounts to USD 223 annually per person. Dinamos Park is visited by three types of visitors. One type accounts for a third of the visitors, and is not responsive to travel costs. The second and third types assign recreational values of, respectively, USD 2 and USD 6 per trip. The weighted average recreational value of Dinamos amounts to USD 158 annually per person.

Conclusions:

We suggest that these estimates can be interpreted as lower bounds of the value of the recreational value of the forests under studies, due to Mexico City’s sprawl, population increase, and the improvement in the economic conditions of its inhabitants.