Aaron J Enriquez, PhD
Aaron Enriquez is a Research Economist in the Social and Economic Analysis Branch at the USGS Fort Collins Science Center. Broadly speaking, Aaron's research centers around the intersection of human and natural systems. His main areas of interest include the economics of wildlife, fisheries, and outdoor recreation, as well as the valuation of ecosystem goods and services.
Economics of Outdoor Recreation
Planning and managing outdoor recreation on public land and water entails a series of choices, many of which are economic in nature. Economics is useful for informing a wide range of decision-making processes in the context of outdoor recreation management.
Wildlife Economics
Wildlife economics can help us better understand, and sometimes even quantify, the various relationships between humans and wildlife species. Moreover, this research can help uncover key insights about socially optimal management of wildlife species, which is especially important in rapidly changing environments and conditions.
Research Highlight: How much is that grizzly in the window?
Wildlife viewing, pristine ecosystems, photogenic landscapes – how would you convey the economic value of the seemingly priceless resources that National Parks provide? While it can be difficult to put a value on nonmarket goods and services, in a new study, economists from the National Park Service and USGS developed an approach for doing just that with bears.
Aaron's passion for environment and natural resource (ENR) research stems from an interdisciplinary background. He has received a B.S. in Biology, a B.S. in Economics, an M.S. in Economics and ENR, and a Ph.D. in Economics, all from the University of Wyoming. Aaron is particularly interested in combining bioeconomic modeling and nonmarket valuation to better capture feedback between economic and ecological systems. As a graduate student, he applied this style of approach to human-grizzly bear interactions in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. As a postdoc at the University of Alaska Anchorage, he estimated the nonmarket value of wild sockeye salmon using recreation permit data. Aaron has worked on many other ENR applications, including uncovering people's values for viewing individual wildlife species, determining people's willingness to pay to conserve wide-ranging wildlife, examining how people's risk perceptions influence their protective actions against wildlife and pests, and quantifying people's preferences for "ugly" agricultural produce.
