Valuing the Invaluable: An Investigation of Outdoor Recreation Behavior, Perceived Values of Ecosystem Services, and Biophysical Conditions on Channel Islands National Park

Impacts on parks and protected areas are modifying ecosystems that provide benefits to sustain human health and well-being. Compelling evidence of ecological and economic values has been gathered to better understand the implications of these changing social-ecological conditions; however, social values have received considerably less attention. There is a strong need to integrate disciplinary perspectives on the value concept and illustrate the full value of nature experienced through outdoor recreation activities. My dissertation drew from theoretical frameworks in psychology, economics, and ecology to better understand the multiple values of Channel Islands National Park (CINP), California, U.S. Specifically, I examined ?held? value orientations, ?assigned? values of ecosystem services, and ecological values of the CINP. In first of three papers, I tested the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory of environmentalism to determine the psychological processes driving low-impact behavior among outdoor recreationists. I observed that behavioral engagement was more strongly related to biospheric-altruistic held values than egoistic concerns. Also, moral norm activation was a direct antecedent to behaviors that minimized the spread of invasive species, degradation of archeological artifacts, and overfishing in marine protected areas. In the second paper, I investigated how environmental worldview shaped the spatial dynamics of assigned values for ecosystem services on Santa Cruz Island within the CINP. Using Public Participation Geographic Information Systems methods, I found that held value orientations (i.e., biocentrism, anthropocentrism) manifested different values ascribed to marine and terrestrial environments. In the third paper, I compared assigned biodiversity values to spatially-explicit measures of ecosystem structure and function using a Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SolVES) mapping application and Maximum Entropy modeling. My results showed that distance to features relevant for park management, carbon sequestration, species richness, elevation, vegetation density, and several categories of land cover predicted the locations and intensity of preferences for biodiversity on Santa Cruz.