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).
Acknowledgements: 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.
Replication: Data + code publicly available here: https://github.com/pmpk20/DruidD1
Role: 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.
Findings:
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.
Explore: I wrote a Shiny app here (https://pmpk20.shinyapps.io/druid-d1-yield-loss-explorer/) where you can see how the yield curves across each permutation of crop prices, NE efficacy, and pest density.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Tom (who was invaluable in the survey + CE design), Tree (who edited the manuscript and reviewed the survey), and Martin (who has an excellent eye for detail in the survey and manuscript!). Also thanks to People and Nature for excellent reviews.
Replication: Data + code publicly available here: https://github.com/pmpk20/DruidD2/ (and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20799844)
Role: 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.
Findings:
People can be willing to pay for, and derive wellbeing from, the conservation of bees, beetles, and wasps
We distinguish between 'existence' and 'bequest' values and show that bequest is an important aspect of values.
Methodologically, we show that public preferences for these use and non-use values derived from insects are extremely heterogeneous - we had to use a latent-class model with mixed preferences within-classes.
Why does it matter:
How much conservation policy is focused on charismatic species? How much on short-termism? In this work we show that respondents were willing to support longer-term intergenerational conservation of a range of insects.
What changed in review:
By far the main efforts was on increasing the clarity of the definition of bequest that we use - here we study a bequest of non-use values - and that we recovered only one, among many, use values. We updated our references around these topics too and added a link to the ESVD.
Expanded the framing from just existence vs bequest to be more broadly about the heterogeneity in preferences - which to be fair is what all our results are about.
Clarified how the wellbeing scores (moved from SI to manuscript) affected preferences, and how latent classes were allocated.
Explore: Claude and I wrote this Shiny app (here: https://pmpk20.shinyapps.io/biowell4/) that shows you how your self-reported wellbeing from insects compares to our latent classes.
See your insect wellbeing here!