Visitors’ Attitudes Towards and Willingness-to-Pay for Hypothetical Hoop Pine Plantations on the Pastoral Southern Atherton Tablelands, Australia

The southern Atherton Tablelands comprises diverse green spaces—meadows, croplands, woodlots and rainforest—which are integrated into a large-scale tablelands landscape. This paper examines visitors’ perceptions of the landscape of the southern Atherton Tablelands as a form of public good and their reaction to a hypothetical alteration to the landscape of the tablelands region by establishing small-scale hoop pine plantations on degraded lands. A survey conducted in 2005 indicated that the hoop pine plantations would not reduce the public enjoyment of the tablelands landscape. From the pairwise comparisons of vegetation types, it was found that the sample of tourists statistically equally preferred the ‘grazing land’ and the ‘hoop pine plantation’. In contrast, the local residents were found to prefer the ‘grazing land’ to the ‘hoop pine plantation’, at the 5% significance level. From a double-bounded contingent valuation study, it was found that the tourists were willing to pay A$13.82 per room per visit on average to support the establishment of hoop pine plantations on the southern Atherton Tablelands whereas local residents were willing to pay A$7.86 per year for the next 5 years for the same project.