Choice experiments for the management of Los Mármoles National Park, Mexico

Introduction: the planning and management of activities in Los Marmoles National Park should include the opinions of users and visitors in order to generate sustainable economic alternatives in line with conservation objectives. Objective: to estimate the economic value of the implementation of an improvement plan (access roads, forest health, biodiversity protection and recreation spaces) for the management of Los Marmoles National Park. Materials and methods: the economic value of implementing an improvement plan was estimated through choice experiments, by means of a conditional logit Model. To this end, key actors were interviewed, participatory diagnostic workshops were held and a survey was applied to 144 tourists, who expressed the order of preferences for the attributes of the improvement plan. Results and discussion: the survey participants assigned greater willingness to pay for the forest health attribute (16.51 MXN) than to access roads and parking sites (13.74 MXN) and biodiversity protection (9.28 MXN). The attribute on improvements to recreational spaces was not statistically significant, reflecting a greater appreciation for maintaining the site’s undisturbed conditions. Conclusions: the choice experiments in the management of policies for the handling of Natural Protected Areas allowed to identify the areas of opportunity and value them economically, through the opinion of the actors involved in the activities of Los Marmoles National Park.