Mapping of the forest recreation service in Lorraine: applying high-resolution spatial data and travel mode information

Focus on ecosystem services and increased availability of spatial dataset describing ecosystems have generated a large interest in ecosystem service mapping. Maps of ecosystem services make the spatial heterogeneity in supply of demand for ecosystem services evident and they may serve as important tools for management and spatially targeted policies. In the present study we develop an approach for mapping forest recreation service based on high-resolution data and explicitly accounting for the visitors’ choice of travel mode. The demand for forest recreation, including the demand for forest attributes is estimated, applying the travel cost method and using data from a web-based survey and from a GIS database describing forests and the access to forests. The approach is applied to data from a recent survey carried out in Lorraine. Compared to previous mappings of the economic value of forest recreation, the present study also accounts for visitors who are not going by car, i.e. we include people walking and biking to the forests. In Lorraine car-borne visitors represent only about half of the forest visitors. The results shows that the choice of travel mode depend on the access to forest, implying that the travel mode should be modelled as an endogenous variable in scenarios where access to forest changes. The proposed model framework allow for this.