Valuing environmental assets on rural lifestyle properties

Changing land-ownership patterns transform many rural landscapes from agricultural to multifunctional, which may have significant implications for land management and conservation policy. This paper presents a hedonic pricing model that quantifies the value of the remnant native vegetation captured by owners of rural lifestyle properties in rural Victoria, Australia. Remnant native vegetation has a positive but diminishing marginal implicit price. The value of lifestyle properties is maximized when their proportion of area occupied by native vegetation is about 40%. Most lifestyle landowners would receive benefits from increasing the area of native vegetation on their land. Findings from this study will be used to support decisions about ecological restoration on private lands in fragmented agriculture-dominated landscapes.