Land Use: Grass, Shrub & Prairie Lands
Ecosystem Service: Recreation
Regional Value Estimate: $19 per acre per year
Confidence Level (in estimated value): Moderate

How was value determined:

1. Recreation on grass, shrub and prairie lands was assumed to be hunting only.
2. The county-level values for grass, shrub and prairie lands recreation were transferred from one peer-reviewed article valuing deer hunting in Northern Lower Michigan and one federal government report valuing pheasant hunting throughout the United States (Feltus and Langenau 1984; Feather et al. 1999).
3. Deer hunting values were converted to an annual per acre figure utilizing Michigan deer harvest figures by county for 2005 (Frawley 2006) and added to the pheasant hunting per acre values.

Value estimate limitations:

1. Deer hunting data are not recent (1984). Nonetheless, these data are comparable to more recent data if we assume that it takes 10 hunting days to achieve each deer kill.
2. We did not take into consideration other types of hunting or recreation that might occur on orchards or special crops (e.g., snowmobiling) because there was insufficient information from other studies that could be transferred to West Michigan for this ecosystem service and/or land use. As a result, our value estimate is biased downward.