LEEP-CRPR Seminar: Scope effects and spatial heterogeneity when valuing land use and management in the remote Kimberley region of Australia

The Kimberley is the most northern part of Western Australia where the current land use is dominated by beef pastoralism. However, there is growing interest in land use and management from other stakeholders; such as Aboriginal land management and access, water resource development for irrigated agriculture, mining and oil and gas development, and conservation activities, among others. This seminar will present a spatially explicit discrete choice experiment to estimate values for the Kimberley region as a whole, and for two separate smaller sub-regions, allowing us to test for geographical scope sensitivity. Coastal management outcomes for different regions were displayed on a map to explicitly show respondents where changes would occur. After discussing some results I will present for discussion the opportunities and challenges facing my current PhD research project in the Kimberley rangelands; exploring spatially explicit values for recreation using mobile technology and the travel cost method, and values for land use using spatially explicit choice experiments.