Onsite Characteristics and Diversity Avoidance in Marine Recreational Fishing Demand

Information on recreation site amenities is often sparse. Not only does this information scarcity have the potential to limit recreation activity, particularly if it causes users to forego recreation opportunities, but it also limits the ability of coastal communities to best allocate resources across site amenities to meet the needs of current and potential users and maximize the value of marine resources. In this paper, we estimate travel cost models that make use of a new dataset on fishing site characteristics to investigate the degree to which a large vector of amenities influences the site choice decisions of recreational anglers fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. We also uncover an important role of racial, ethnic, and income diversity considerations in recreation decision-making. We contextualize the valuation estimates, and combined with the findings of angler tendencies to avoid diversity, discuss the implications for coastal resource management.