Abstract
The study presents the results from composite approach where scenic beauty estimation technique is combined together with choice experiment study, thus approximating welfare estimates from different forestry management practices. The work presented in the paper should fulfil the main objective: to estimate welfare measures for different types of forest management practices taking into account the individuals’ aesthetical perceptions of the appearance of mountain forest stands.
Scenic beauty analysis revealed that visitors assign the lowest aesthetical values to dead and damaged forest stands compared to immature, high spruce and broad-leaved forests. The same results were obtained from basic model – conditional logit model (CLM) – broad-leave and immature trees have positive effect on utility, the opposite effect has dead forest stands.
We construct a composite model that improved the basic CLM with estimated scenic beauty standardized measures for each type of forest stand included in the choice experiment. The results showed that all variables depicting the forest type have in the composite model higher coefficients than in the base model.