PhD defence - Tim Maarten de Kruiff

Rewilding is a new open-ended approach to nature management that emphasizes natural processes and trophic complexity. This approach has been shown to have considerable ecological benefits, but has also been a divisive topic in the public debate, with strong support and opposition from different interest groups and people. Despite its growing prominence as a concept, empirical research on the effects of rewilding on overall societal welfare is limited, and in particular, the literature on the economic effects of rewilding is sparse.

In Tim de Kruiff's thesis, societal preferences for rewilding are analyzed in the context of a human-dominated landscape. It examines how different design choices in rewilding influence societal welfare and explores the underlying drivers for differences in preferences between people.

In the first paper, it is shown that a majority of Danes prefer to visit a forest with large herbivores, with significant differences in preferences between different herbivores. We also show how considerations on the level of access can affect forest recreational value, highlighting possible trade-offs of rewilding in a human-dominated landscape.

The second paper, analyzing rewilding in the riverine landscape of the Netherlands, show a 50-50 division in preferences for the rewilding of this cultural landscape. Further, it shows that preferences for rewilding depend on the initial state of the landscape and that providing information on biodiversity impacts of rewilding has only a limited effect on willingness to pay estimates.

The third paper analyzes in more detail the underlying drivers for support or opposition to rewilding. Paper 3 shows that people holding strong intrinsic value of nature are more likely to support rewilding, while those holding strong instrumental values tend to oppose it. It also shows that a number of socio-economic background characteristics of the individual can help to explain preferences for rewilding through their effect on the latent values as a mediator. Finally, this Paper includes an analysis of how people holding strong intrinsic value of nature engage in economic valuation. It shows that while they engage in the exercise of valuation, the validity of the resulting value estimates can be questioned.

Finally, Paper 4 contributes to the overall topic of the thesis as a methodological note, showing the effect of temporal changes in landscape aesthetics on the valuation of landscapes. We show that the recreational value of forest are dependent on the season. In particular, the findings show that the relative preference of broadleaved over coniferous forests in Denmark, a longstanding result in literature, depends on the season.