There were two parts:
D1: Economic valuation of pest regulation services provided by insects. It was great to be back in economic valuation, but obviously I'm not an entomologist. I'm really pleased how this paper turned out.
D2: A stated preference survey to understand UK respondents wellbeing from, and WTP for, three cultural ecosystem services provided by insects. We narrowed it down to an interactive use value, and two non-use values (existence and bequest), and three common insects (bees, beetles, wasps).
Massive thank you to Tree (who painstakingly worked on the systematic review underpinning the work), Charlotte (who added a the biological control expertise), Tom (who always knew the right citation or argument to make), and Martin (who whipped it into shape). Also thanks to Ecosystem Services for a fast turnaround + good reviews.
Data + code publicly available here: https://github.com/pmpk20/DruidD1
I wrote an economic production function that simulates changes in crop yields across different levels of insect pests, arthropod natural enemies, crops, field management strategies, insecticide costs and thresholds for application.
We found that:
Marginal reductions in natural enemy presence is associated with economically-meaningful changes in crop yields.
The accuracy of our estimated value is limited by the availability of empirical results on yield responses to pests and NEs, especially at lower densities of NEs.
The contribution here is (1) ability to estimate marginal changes in the value of pest regulation at country-scale across three key crops, (2) unearthing a broad range of avenues for future research to improve the precision of our estimates (see the final discussion paragraph!), (3) highlight the contribution of natural enemies to biological control strategies.
Why does it matter:
Insecticides can become either more expensive, less available due to regulation, or less effective due to adaptation. Instead, biological control through supporting larger populations of natural enemies could be a viable way to limit the effects of pest pressure on crop yields.
What changed in review:
Greater detail on how we integrated the systematic review.
Adding discussion of biological control/integrated pest management.
Swapped the yield curves from the main text to the supplementary material, and the sensitivity analysis to the main text.
Stated preferences for cultural ecosystem services provided insects.
King, P., Breeze, T., Robinson, T., Dallimer, D. [journal]
I designed, deployed, and analysed a stated preference survey (N = 1,684) to evaluate wellbeing and WTP for cultural ecosystem services provided by UK insects.
Data + code + survey will be here: https://github.com/pmpk20/D2Backup
Although we're keeping the results until the publication, I can tell you that Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini and I wrote this Shiny app (left) that shows you how your self-reported wellbeing from insects compares to our latent classes. Feel free to play around: Here [Note: this is the free-tier of shiny]
See your insect wellbeing here!