Assessment And Influencing Factors Analysis On Ecological Value Of Sanjiang Plain Wetlands Based On Cvm

Due to its special geographical environment and ecological status, Sanjiang plain wetland plays a very important role in the ecological environment construction in Heilongjiang province and even in China. In recent years, Heilongjiang province has made continuous efforts to protect the Sanjiang plain wetlands, which alleviated the trend of wetland degradation to some extent. However, due to the vulnerability of the wetland ecosystem retained itself, and the emerging of global environmental problems, and focusing on short-term benefits while ignoring the long-term sustainability, the obvious contradiction between the protection and development of wetland resources in the wetland use, together brought a lot of negative factors to wetland ecosystem’s health and management.The protection of Sanjiang plain wetlands is a long-term work, which need the joint efforts of the whole society in many industries, but also depends on public awareness of environmental protection, and the public awareness of environmental protection depends on comprehensive knowledge and understanding of wetland’s value. In this paper, it used the contingent valuation method(CVM) which in recent years had widely been used in the evaluation of environmental value, through payment survey, estimated the ecological value of wetlands in Sanjiang plain from the perspective of the demand side (public), including the non-use values. It made the compare for the monetary value between protection and development possible, providing the basis for the government and relevant departments to use and manage the wetlands rationally.By designing payment card survey questionnaire according to the CVM principle, through interviews and Internet surveys, it got the public’s willingness to pay for the ecological value of wetland ecosystem. A total of1197questionnaires were withdrawed, removing the questionnaires with careless answer and missing important options, this study got a total of988valid questionnaires. Reliability and validity analysis showed that the questionnaire in this study had good internal consistency and good construction validity, which proved the questionnaire information had good value.Through statistical analysis of questionnaire data, it got that average willingness to pay for the Sanjiang plain wetland’s ecological value was52.77yuan per year, and the ecological value of Sanjiang plain wetland was about1.78billion yuan per year, the non-use values accounting for34.47%of the total value. From the public point of view, the order of ecological value was as follows:heritage value>value of maintaining biodiversity>value of water purification and pollution degradation>existance value>value of controlling flood and recharging groundwater>value of adjusting climate>value of updating and maintaining soil fertility.Introducing the personal space property "location" into the assessment function of willingness to pay, Tobit model was used to analyze the factors that influenced the amount of respondents’ willingness to pay, the results showed that the interest degree for environmental protection in the Sanjiang plain region, the importance people lay to the protection of Sanjiang plain wetlands, respondents’location, respondents’age, and whether or not the respondents’occupation were staff of the government institutions or the enterprises institutions, had significant influence on the willingness to pay. Respondentss’s age had a negative impact on the willingness to pay, other significant factors had positive impact on willingness to pay. Dividing the willingness to pay into two types, zero-payment and non-zero, through the application of the Naive Bayes classifier, the mean correct classification rate was84.69percent for prediction samples.Multinomial logit model and mixed logit model were applied to analyze the respondents’ choice behavior, it got conclusions that relative to the choice of heritage value, people had the higher annual income tended to pay more attention to the heritage value of the wetland, and people with higher education tended to choose the other value other than the heritage value, people who concerned more about environment tended to pay more attention to the ecological function such as providing habitat for wildlife and maintaining biodiversity, updating and maintaining soil fertility, and so on. From the micro level it revealed people’s different preferences and the process of the choice behavior for the ecological value of wetlands.Finally, it gave the conclutions and discussions for the whole paper.