7812

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7812
• Author: Many
• Title: Rivers, Studies in the Science, Environmental Policy, and Law of Instream Flow
• USFW Year: 1990
• USFW - Doc Type: Rivers
• Copyright Material: YES

on improving the number of fish caught
on the North Fork Feather River. Lower
flows can result in greater angler access to
fish and may temporarily result in an in-
crease in catch until reduced water quan-
tity and quality kills the remaining fish.
This is not a sustainable change in fishing
quality, however, and has been excluded
in our analysis. Increases in flow may also
increase the size of fish caught, but this
benefit has not been measured in this study.
The flow in the river may have additional
value to anglers in terms of the river's aes-
thetics. Barring site congestion increases in
flow and fishing quality may induce ad-
ditional anglers to visit the North Fork
Feather River thereby increasing recre-
ational benefits. Increased streamflow is
much like a public good in that it is also
available to other river users such as boat-
ers, swimmers and picnickers. These ben-
efits need to be added to the $73.00 per cfs
previously estimated.
To the extent that anglers represent most
of the river's users and fishing quality is
their dominant concern regarding stream-
flow, fish stocking might be a viable mit-
igation option to offset below natural flows.
Our simple bioeconomic model provides
the information on the productivity of in-
stream flow in producing fish (equation
[4]) and how anglers value additional fish
caught. This information can be compared
with how much society values additional
electricity production and the productivity
of the river for some other out-of-stream
purposes. A comparison between these two
values would indicate whether fish pro-
duction is more inexpensively carried out
using flow in the river or at a hatchery.
The estimation procedure outlined in this
paper can be generalized to many possible
TCM demand functions that include a vari-
able(s) which measures site quality. If the
site quality measure is a function of some
variable that can be manipulated by a de-
cision maker, then the analyst can directly
estimate the changes in visitors' net eco-
nomic benefits resulting from changes in
the level of this variable.
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J. Loomis and J. Cooper 29 '