How Much Would You Pay to See a Bear? A Study Puts a Price on Sightings in Yellowstone.

The days of valuing a bear in the American West by its pelt or claws are long gone, but bears still hold economic value to humans. Simply seeing one in the wild is a life-changing moment for many, and bear sightings are a key reason for tourism in wilderness areas like Yellowstone National Park.

Now, a study conducted in part by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has put a price tag on bear sightings in Yellowstone. Economists found each grizzly bear sighting is worth about $16, while a back bear is worth approximately $14. Across all visitors every year, grizzly bears and black bears generate roughly $6.9 million and $9.7 million, respectively.

The USGS explains that the study arose from a desire to understand the complex balance of costs and benefits that makes management of high-profile animals, such as bears, so complicated.

“On one hand, some species inflict costs on humans through conflicts like property damages, livestock depredations, and injuries,” writes the USGS in an accompanying report. “On the other hand, the same species can generate immense value to society: people like viewing wildlife and benefit from wildlife contributions to ecosystem health.”

As keystone species, bears are vital for a strong ecosystem, playing crucial roles in seed dispersal, species management, and soil enrichment. The apex predator, as any regular reader of Outside’s bear coverage will recall, also presents a danger to humans.

Understanding the economic value of species like grizzly bears helps inform wildlife management policies, allowing managers to more easily “compare costs and benefits in an apples-to-apples way,” says the USGS. If a proposed policy would result in a significant change in the number of animals in the wild, how would humans be impacted? Would the benefits outweigh the costs?

For something like livestock, which has a clear market value, economic valuation is easy. For a bear, it’s more complex.

“Goods and services that don’t have market prices tend to be undervalued, potentially even ignored altogether in things like benefit-cost analysis,” said Aaron Enriquez, USGS research economist and study co-author, in the report.

Enriquez and Leslie Richardson, a research economist from the National Park Service, examined data from visitor surveys in Yellowstone. They took into account the values of experiences such as wildlife viewing trips, individual animal sightings, and the total number of sightings over the course of a year.

Enriquez noted that this number is just one slice of the pie.

“What we’ve done is tried to quantify just one small piece of the total economic value of bears, by estimating a `use’ value from bear sightings,” he said. “The entire total value of bears would be higher, especially if one accounted for ‘non-use’ values like existence value. As more types of values get filled in over time, we’ll continue to have a better picture of how much society benefits from bears.”

The idea of holistically calculating the economic value of a given species isn’t a new one. African elephants, for instance, are valued at more than $1 million for their role in carbon sequestration. Kelp forests contribute over $363,000 per acre, primarily due to the same reason.

At least in the case of the bears at Yellowstone, however, not everyone is in favor of putting a price tag on nature.

“This kind of exercise seems to be done by people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing,” retired wildlife expert Chuck Neal told Wyoming news outlet Cowboy State Daily. “There are certain individuals who would say if a bear is worth $46,000, we can easily afford to lose $46,000.”

Kristin Combs, the executive director of nonprofit Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, noted that, “you couldn’t put a value on a human’s life, and I feel like it’s the same way with this study.” She also argued that the study was critical, “because it tells the story about how beneficial it is to have these grizzlies around.”

The USGS study comes at a time when there is a concentrated push to remove grizzlies from the Endangered Species List, which would give states control over their management and may allow for their legal hunting.

Combs argued that having this concrete (and high) valuation of $46,000 per bear, as a reference, would help advocate for higher permit costs.

“The last time grizzly bear hunting was brought up, we were looking at $6,000 for an out-of-state hunting tag,” Combs said. “If a Yellowstone grizzly is worth $46,000, that’s a hell of a lot more money, and you can’t underestimate the economic value of having these animals on the landscape.”