How Much Is a Bear Worth?, with Lynne Lewis

Notable Quotes

• Popu-bear-ity contest: “We were very interested in whether the ability to identify—and identify with—individual animals influences willingness to pay for conservation. Not surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes.” (8:47)
• Surveys indicate bears are undervalued by state governments: “We estimated a preservation value of $70–$140 per person per year, or a minimum of $260,000 annually for the preservation of one individual brown bear. Given that restitution values (or fines for illegally killing a bear in most states) are much lower—anywhere from a few thousand dollars to about $25,000—we think this is a pretty significant result.” (11:27)
• Visitors overcrowding Katmai National Park: “Visitation at Brooks Camp [in Katmai] has more than doubled since the late 2000s. Of course, increased visitation can tax the ability of the National Park Service to do its job in any of these parks to protect wildlife, flora, archaeological resources, and park infrastructure and provide a high-quality visitor experience … We heard frequently about greater levels of crowding, the worries, and the potential for human-wildlife conflicts.” (20:50)

Top of the Stack

• “Getting to Know You: Individual Animals, Wildlife Webcams, and Willingness to Pay for Brown Bear Preservation” by Leslie Richardson and Lynne Lewis
• “The Charisma Premium: Iconic Individuals and Wildlife Values” by Christopher Costello, Lynne Lewis, John Lynham, and Leslie Richardson
• Live cam of brown bears at Katmai National Park in Alaska
• The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska’s Brooks River by Michael Fitz
• The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Margaret Walls. My guest today is Lynne Lewis. Lynne is the Elmer W. Campbell Professor of Economics at Bates College and will soon be a professor of agricultural and resource economics at Colorado State University.

Lynne's research is wide-ranging, but today, she's here to talk to us about bears; specifically, brown bears in Alaska. I'm going to ask Lynne about a couple of her published research papers about bears and a new survey that she conducted last summer in Katmai National Park. So, we're going to talk about bear cams, charismatic wildlife, nonmarket valuation, overcrowding in national parks, and more—lots of good stuff, so stay with us.

Hello Lynne, welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Lynne Lewis: Hi Margaret. Thanks so much for inviting me on the show.

Margaret Walls: I'm glad to have you on. Before we dive in, Lynne—you probably know we do this—but I want to ask you a bit about your background. You and I are friends, but I don't even really know how you came to be an environmental economist. Tell us a little bit about that and how you gravitated towards these topics we're going to talk about today.

Lynne Lewis: Okay. Well, it wasn't a straight path, by any means. I started college in the sciences. I thought I wanted to go to vet school, so this theme of loving animals is going to be a thread throughout today. I discovered environmental economics after college. I was intrigued, because it allowed me to combine my love of science with the powerful tools of economics to inform policy and also allowed me to learn about human behavior.

At the time, I was very focused on water-allocation issues in the arid climates, but much of my recent work has focused on nonmarket valuation, and that's the valuation of things that don't have traditional market prices: free-flowing rivers, the value of fish and wildlife, and the like. There's a need to determine their values so that nature can have, I like to say, “a seat at the table” when decisions are made. When we use benefit-cost analysis, for example, it's incomplete without the inclusion of all the benefits and all the costs. My work has focused on two areas or methods: revealed-preference methods and stated-preference methods.

Revealed-preference methods, as I imagine many of your listeners will know, allow us to infer the value of an attribute of a good based on how much people pay for that good. Stated-preference studies, on the other hand, are survey methods through which we ask people about their willingness to pay for things that don't have market prices. One of those survey methods is called contingent valuation, and that's a method where we directly ask people their willingness to pay for some hypothetical scenario—and this is a bit of a preview of what we're going to talk about here today—but when I discovered the live bear cam based in Katmai National Park and learned a little bit about these brown bears, I knew that I needed to go check this place out.

I was fortunate enough to get a spot in the 2018 lottery. While I was there, I suddenly realized there were a bunch of interesting research questions about how people value individual animals. When I returned, I sent a message to Mike Fitz, who's an interpreter at Explore.org and a former Katmai ranger, and I told him what I was interested in learning, and he was pretty excited, because he was interested in some of the same things. We brought Leslie Richardson, an economist with the National Park Service, in on our ideas. Within a week, we were developing and pretesting a survey. So, finally, I had figured out how to do research and do economics in and about an exotic place and merge in my love of animals.

Margaret Walls: I love that story about how that all came to be. That's great.

Let's talk about the work itself. You have a couple of published papers that use the survey data you gathered from people who use the webcams that you just mentioned in Katmai National Park. These are the bear cams that show the brown bears catching salmon and doing other things. They're really cool; I've looked at them before. Can you start just telling us a little bit about those cameras, about the park, and about Fat Bear Week, which is centered on the bears in Katmai? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that; I think that'll set up your study pretty well.

Lynne Lewis: Katmai National Park is about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage. It's a really remote park, it's only accessible by float plane or by boat. It's estimated that about 2,200 brown bears live in Katmai National Park, and about 80 of those frequent the Brooks River area every summer. The bears that come back year after year are identified by a bear biologist and given numbers and, sometimes, nicknames.

Brooks Camp, the area within Katmai National Park where these bear cams are, has a very small number of cabins that are available by lottery, and there's also a campground. While not many people can stay overnight, there are also a lot of outfitters that offer day trips to Brooks Camp, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, I imagine. But in 2012, Explore.org installed webcams in a few places along the Brooks River, and those webcams allow viewers like you and me to watch these bears in real time during the sockeye salmon run, which runs from about July through September.

One of those webcams is on the Brooks Falls platform. This is the place that has that iconic view of the falls. You might be able to picture it in your head right now: you can watch the bears standing on the lip and catching salmon in the air as they jump or sitting right below the falls in the fast-moving area that's nicknamed “the jacuzzi.” Brooks Falls is one of the only places where this many bears will congregate together in such large numbers. They're willing to tolerate each other—well, not all the time, but much of the time—just due to the abundance of food there. The first time I got to go in 2018, I saw 28 bears in my line of sight at one time. A couple of years ago, there was an exceptionally large salmon run, and there were apparently 50 bears at one time, which is hard to imagine.

But the bear-viewing at Brooks Camp is also unique, because many of the same bears come back to this location year after year, and they're identified with numbers. They have ID numbers, sometimes nicknames, and these bears' life histories, behaviors, and physical characteristics are used by Explore.org and by the National Park Service to interpret the lives of these individual bears for the visitors and for bear-cam viewers, and viewers can get to know these individual bears by what they look like, their physical characteristics, their behaviors, and their personalities. Many of these bears garner a big fan base, and some visitors come just to try to see specific bears.

In October every year, there's a bracketed tournament, a lot like March Madness, in which the fattest bears are pitted against each other for the glory of the title of Fat Bear Week champion. Obviously the bears know nothing about this and don't really care, but hundreds of thousands of people have cast votes for their favorites. There's a bar in Brooklyn that only shows the bear cam; it's gotten a lot of press. Last fall, a female, 128 Grazer, crushed the monster-sized 32 Chunk in the finals, and that was fun. Anyway, I'm guessing many of your listeners are familiar with Fat Bear Week, and I was curious, have you ever voted for a fat bear, Margaret? You can tell us.

Margaret Walls: Yes, one year I did vote. I can't remember the details. I should have gone back and looked before recording this. But I definitely remember voting and just studying them all and trying to figure it out. It's really great.

Let's talk about geekier stuff here. Your first paper … You mentioned Leslie Richardson, an economist at the National Park Service, and you coauthored this paper with her. I'm just going to read the title, because I think it's a cool title. It's called, “Getting to Know You: Individual Animals, Wildlife Webcams, and Willingness to Pay for Brown Bear Preservation.” That's a great title, it gives you a good sense of what the paper's really about, but tell us about the survey you conducted—this was of the webcam users—and what you set out to study and the motivation for it. You've already said a little bit, but maybe just go into a little more detail.

Lynne Lewis: We had two primary motivations. We were very interested in whether the ability to identify—and identify with—individual animals influences willingness to pay for conservation. Not surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes. The economics literature is relatively silent on the value of individual animals, but there are many individuals that have become popular, like Cecil the Lion and P-22 the mountain lion. Thousands of people came to his funeral in Los Angeles. There’s Grizzly 399 in Yellowstone, Fungie the Dolphin, many of these brown bears we're talking about … and the National Park Service where Leslie works and other wildlife agencies are charged with protecting some of the world's most iconic wildlife resources and their habitats for current and future generations.

So, it's important to understand how the public values this sort of preservation. There are times when wildlife managers need this information about the value of individual animals. For instance, if there's a case of poaching or other incidents that involve the loss of a single animal or a small number of animals. In the absence of value estimates for these individuals, wildlife managers have to rely on proxy measures that may have little or no basis in economic valuation. This study presents one of the first applications of the use of the contingent-valuation survey method focused on the total economic value of an individual animal.

Margaret Walls: That's really interesting. What did you find in that first study?

Lynne Lewis: We posted the survey on Explore.org in July of 2019, and almost 6,000 people responded that year, and about half that number responded in 2020. We were really surprised at how many people responded to the survey; that was pretty exciting to get a data set that looks like this.

Our survey asked respondents in part about their willingness to donate money to prevent the loss of an individual bear in a hypothetical scenario, and willingness-to-pay amounts were randomized between $5 and $500. Margaret, if you got a survey, you might've been asked, "Would you be willing to pay $150?" I might've been asked, "Are you willing to pay $2?" We had a variation of those numbers. The intention is not to make people actually pay money, but rather to determine the value of a nonmarket resource that people don't pay for directly, such as the preservation of brown bears.

The goal is to estimate the value that's not traded in an actual market—the value of that good or service or the value of that bear—and the results can be used to help make decisions on how to use scarce financial resources for conservation. Our results suggest that the preservation values can be quite large. In fact, we estimated a preservation value of $70–$140 per person per year, or a minimum of $260,000 annually for the preservation of one individual brown bear. Given that restitution values (or fines for illegally killing a bear in most states) are much lower—anywhere from a few thousand dollars to about $25,000—we think this is a pretty significant result. We also calculated a premium of about $40,000 for a bear someone had actually seen online.

Margaret Walls: That's super interesting. Those “restitution values”—is that the term that gets used, Lynne, when a bear gets killed, and you use these numbers from Alaska and Wyoming? Is that what you're talking about?

Lynne Lewis: It technically means to restore something. Restoring that value to the public is what these wildlife agencies do, but it's essentially a fine on the person if they're found.

Margaret Walls: I could keep talking about that, but let me go on, because I want to talk about the follow-on work that you're doing and the next paper you wrote after that one in which you and some coauthors looked at this in more detail.

You wrote down a theoretical model, which we're not going to get into on Resources Radio; we're not going to talk about all of those details on the math involved. But you take this model to the data, these Katmai survey-response data, and what you're looking at is the heterogeneity and the values of these bears. This has some implications, so tell us a little bit about those findings and what the significance of that heterogeneity and values is.

Lynne Lewis: Yeah, this is a math-heavy paper, and it's a paper with Chris Costello, John Lynham, and Leslie Richardson. Basically, we developed a model that shows that heterogeneity in charisma, or variability in charisma, raises the value not just of that particular individual, but also of the whole population. In contrast, the existing recreation literature treats all individuals as interchangeable or basically the same. This is a big change. We find that more charismatic animals confer higher values than their less charismatic, or less-known, peers. Populations with variability in charisma are more valuable than populations whose individuals may be less distinguishable from each other. Populations with more heterogeneous charisma raise the value of their most charismatic animals. Our results suggest that traditional approaches to wildlife-viewing valuation might be inappropriate when specific individuals within this population are singled out as being more charismatic by viewers.

Then, we apply that model to our bear-viewing data in Katmai National Park. In our survey, we had asked people, "Do you have a favorite bear or favorite bears?" We used those mentions of specific bears to model charisma. We find that the most charismatic bear, Otis, is more than twice as valuable as any other bear; in fact, more than an order of magnitude more valuable than the 25th-most-charismatic bear. These differences in marginal values of Katmai bears emphasize that the value, if we just use the value of an average-charisma bear, is a poor proxy for the value of the most popular bears.

We think our results have all sorts of interesting implications. They can help wildlife agencies better understand how an animal's charisma affects the wildlife-viewing experience and people's values for wildlife. They can also help us better understand return on investment in technologies, such as these webcams, that allow viewers to connect with these individuals. Then, of course, in those unfortunate incidents when an individual animal is intentionally or accidentally killed, they can help wildlife managers more accurately assess that loss to the public.

Margaret Walls: You mentioned Otis, so I have to ask about Otis. Those values were really high, so tell us about Otis.

Lynne Lewis: I bet he's the bear you voted for. Bear 480, Otis, is the oldest known male brown bear in Katmai. If he returns this year, he'll be 28 years old, I believe, which is very old for a male brown bear. He's a four-time Fat Bear Week champion, and he's enormously popular with viewers and people, including many professional photographers traveling to Katmai just in the hopes of seeing him. I confess, I did the same thing the first time I visited in 2018. I really wanted to see Otis, and I did, which was very exciting.

The second-most-mentioned favorite bear in our 2019 survey was 435, Holly. She's also a Fat Bear Week champion, but she's also special because in 2015, I believe, she adopted an abandoned cub. There was an abandoned one-and-a-half-year-old cub in Brooks Camp. He was too young to survive on his own, and Holly had her own cub, a six-month-old cub that year, and she eventually adopted the abandoned cub and raised him successfully with her own younger cub for two years. This had never been documented before in the wild, to my knowledge. That adopted cub is now a large adult male, bear number 503, which is also popular with viewers. He used to float around on his back in the jacuzzi with his feet in the air. Talk about charisma.

Margaret Walls: No kidding. Yeah.

Lynne Lewis: Sisters 909 and 910, daughters of the famous 409, Beadnose, caught the attention of everyone in 2022 when they raised their cubs together, alternating playing and babysitting with the cubs and then with each other. Last spring, when bear 909 emancipated her two-and-a-half-year-old cub, which is about the time the mothers kicked them out, that cub hung around with her familiar aunt, 910 and 910's one-and-a-half-year-old cub, and then 910 adopted her sister's cub. I got to see them in person last summer: 910, with one giant cub and one smaller cub. There's just so many unique individuals.

Margaret Walls: I don't see how you can keep from going back over and over. I was thinking actually, Lynne—I've done two safaris in Africa, and both of those times, the guides have lots of favorite animals and recognize particular lions—especially lions, which are pretty charismatic on their own—all their cubs, and the way their social structure is. I can really understand this individual-charisma factor; it's really fascinating.

I want to turn now to the latest work you're doing. You went to Katmai twice last year in July and September, and you did an on-site survey of visitors. You moved on from the webcam users to actual in-person visitors. Tell us what you were setting out to study this time around.

Lynne Lewis: From the very beginning, we had hoped to pair the online survey with a visitor survey to compare experiences and values for brown-bear viewing. The pandemic derailed those efforts for a few years, but we were finally able to implement the on-site survey this last year, and we were studying some of the same questions as the online survey with the addition of questions about on-site experiences.

We asked about demographic and trip characteristics of Brooks Camp visitors; for example, we asked whether they'd seen a bear in the wild before this trip, how many bears had they seen that day. We also asked about visitor perceptions regarding elements of the Brooks Camp experience, such as congestion, crowding, and wait times to get on the falls platform. We asked about experiences with rangers. We also asked about the influence of the bear cams on their visit and whether the opportunity to watch specific individual bears influenced their visit. Then, finally, we asked about whether they'd be willing to pay to protect individual bears. 667 respondents completed the survey—487 in July, and 180 in September.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, that's great. I'm going to ask about the congestion piece. I think you experienced some of this yourself; you shared a photo that I thought was interesting. There's a large number of visitors now to the park, and there is a bit of congestion, but I want to ask you about that … some wait times to get on the bridge where people view the bears.

There've been a lot of stories in recent years about problems of this type in our national parks, especially during peak seasons. Certain parks in the lower 48, like Zion and Utah and some of the other crown jewels, as we refer to them, are really dealing with some large numbers of visitors. And it's straining park resources, changing visitors’ enjoyment of the parks, and I think the Park Service is struggling on how to address this.

But Katmai is so far away from where we all live (most of us live), so I wouldn't think it would have these problems. Yet I guess it probably does have a little bit. Tell us a little bit about that, what you learned in your survey about people's feelings about it, and what you saw, yourself.

Lynne Lewis: Visitation at Brooks Camp has more than doubled since the late 2000s. Of course, increased visitation can tax the ability of the National Park Service to do its job in any of these parks to protect wildlife, flora, archaeological resources, and park infrastructure and provide a high-quality visitor experience. Rangers, staff, and visitors at Brooks Camp speak of … We heard frequently about greater levels of crowding, the worries, and the potential for human-wildlife conflicts at Brooks Camp. Even though it's remote, hundreds of visitors come for day trips during the month of July, especially. When you've got up to 50 hungry bears running around, that's a scary proposition, in my opinion. But every person who comes to Brooks Camp and every person who visits is required to attend a mandatory National Park Service bear orientation and safety talk. So, we use the attendance of the mandatory Brooks Camp bear orientations as a proxy for site visitation.

In July of last year, an average of almost 300 people per day attended bear orientation. The highest number of bear-orientation attendees during our survey period, July 5 to July 14, was 389 people on July 13. During the day in July, the waitlist to get on the 40-person Brooks Falls platform can be two hours or more. From our survey results, the most-cited factors that contributed positively to the visitor experience were the number of bears, the variety of places to view bears, the bear-school orientation, and interactions with rangers. But the most-cited factors that contributed negatively were the number of visitors and the number of people on the platforms. We also asked respondents a bunch of questions about their preferences for reducing the number of day trips, which is very controversial, as you can imagine; other options to reduce congestion; and whether or not they would support a reduction in visitors if it would protect people or bears or enhance the visitor experience.

Respondents were broadly supportive of limits if they were needed to protect visitor experience, to protect brown bears, to reduce environmental impacts, and to protect visitor safety. Interestingly though, respondents were least supportive if it was about visitor safety, which is curious. These are very large, potentially dangerous animals, but that's what we found. Overnight visitors also supported limits on visitation at much higher levels than respondents visiting on day trips.

Margaret Walls: That's interesting. Do you need to plan ahead to go there, Lynne? Do you need to make a reservation, or can you just show up?

Lynne Lewis: To stay there, you have to have a reservation. For example, the lottery that was just held this January is not for dates this summer, it's for dates in 2025. It's way far in advance if you want to get a cabin, unless there's been a cancellation. But the day trips are essentially unlimited. The state of Alaska has not been willing to limit the numbers of people coming into Alaska parks. There are many, many carriers that bring people to where the bears are—probably to Lake Clark, where you went, and also to Katmai and other sites where they know their clients will get to see bears. But I just saw an article about a new cruise coming into Anchorage, a big cruise ship; I think Princess Cruises is now offering a day trip to Katmai National Park as one of their options when you're visiting Anchorage, which is a little concerning to me.

So, you can go. You can be walking around Homer, Alaska, and walk into an outfitter, and get on a plane. You do not necessarily need to plan in advance for a day trip. It can be a little more spontaneous.

Margaret Walls: Gotcha. Yeah, I did take a trip out of Homer to Lake Clark, not to Katmai, but it was fantastic.

So, you shared some of the survey findings with me, which was good to see some of the summary stats from these survey questions, but you haven't fully analyzed the data and written a paper. What's next? What are you and your coauthors doing with this data you've collected, and what can we look forward to seeing from you?

Lynne Lewis: We've submitted our report with all the raw survey results to the National Park Service and to the Katmai Conservancy, who funded our travel. We hope these results are useful to the National Park Service for future management plans for Katmai National Park. But in our research, we're also examining the willingness-to-pay data in comparing that data to our online survey. Preliminarily, they look quite similar, which is encouraging. As all parks get more and more crowded, and human congestion continues to impact wildlife, perhaps we can expand this work to other parks and other species. Of course, I hope to get back to Katmai National Park and Brooks Camp someday soon.

Margaret Walls: I'm sure you do.

Lynne, I think I could keep talking about this, but we're going to have to close the podcast, and we're going to do that with our regular feature called Top of the Stack. I think you know what that is. I want to ask you to recommend something to our listeners: a book, an article, a podcast, perhaps; or something that's caught your attention lately. What's on the top of your stack?

Lynne Lewis: Well, if you're interested in learning more about brown bears and Katmai National Park, I have to recommend Mike Fitz's book, Bears of Brooks Falls. It's just fantastic. There's a great history on the origin of the park. It was originally designated a national park because of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes that was created by the huge 1912 earthquake. The presence of bears is much more recent, but the book's a great read about the ecological history of the Brooks River and about the difficult quest for survival of brown bears and other wildlife that use the river. So, that's a great read.

I also am reading Dave Grohl's The Storyteller right now. Another passion of mine is live music, and his life path could not be more different than my own, and I just find it fascinating to hear about the struggles of being a musician, getting started, and then eventually becoming the front man for the Foo Fighters. He's a fun writer. He really is a great storyteller, so I'm enjoying that.

Margaret Walls: Oh, great. I appreciate those recommendations.

Lynne, it's been a pleasure having you on Resources Radio. The time just flew. I love talking about brown bears and how to value them and learning about the webcams and the viewer experience in Katmai National Park. It's all really fascinating. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Lynne Lewis: Thanks so much, Margaret. It's been a lot of fun.

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