Ohio Watershed Academy 2009

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Assignment HDSE3-1

Pick a local waterbody that has poor water quality. Propose a plan to improve water quality to good or excellent. Then use the methods in the reading by Jeong and Sohngen to (1) estimate the recreational value of the water body with current water quality; and (2) estimate the recreational value of the water body with an improvement. The difference tells you the value of the improvement. Note that these methods focus only on angling values. You can make your estimates by hand, using worksheets provided in MS Word, or with spreadsheets (both of which you can submit electronically with proper numbers attached). Four worksheets are provided. Brief instructions for using the spreadsheets or word documents are available in "bt_spreadsheet_instructions.pdf."

Word DocumentExcel Spreadsheet
MaintainExcellent.docMaintainExcellent.xls
PoortoExcellent.docPoortoExcellent.xls
PoortoGood.docPoortoGood.xls
GoodtoExcellent.docGoodtoExcellent.xls

Products to turn in for review:

  1. A brief 1 - 2 paragraph description of the waterbody, current water quality conditions, and proposed improvements

  2. Brief description of the important parameters that you have chosen for the analysis of the recreational value of the improvement in water quality and why you chose those values. In the examples in the Fact Sheet and the worksheets, you basically need to determine values for the following items:

    • The local area of interest and the angling population
    • The average annual number of trips taken per angler
    • The proportion of average annual number of trips taken to the specific site you are analyzing.

    Please provide a rationale for the numbers you choose for these based on the discussion provided in the Fact Sheet. Please be as explicit as you can as to the rationale for choosing all of the numbers above. Once you have chosen these parameters, the annual angling recreational value will be calculated automatically in the excel spreadsheets based on our estimates of the value per trip. Feel free to change the value per trip if you would like, but if you do so, provide a rationale for this change.


  3. The MS Word table or spreadsheet showing the results of your analysis.

  4. A brief 1-2 paragraph discussion summarizing whether and why these estimates would be useful for discussion within your watershed.

Evaluation

Assignment HDSE3-1 Evaluation