Small sight—Big might: Economic impact of bird tourism shows opportunities for rural communities and biodiversity conservation

value fishers receive for commercially caught salmon in Alaska which between 2015 and 2020 equalled $607 million [46]. Bird tourism also generated $47.8 million in state and local tax contributions in form of corporate dividends, social insurance, excise taxes, local sales and property taxes, severance taxes, corporate profits, fines and fees, and motor vehicle registrations. In addition, federal tax contributions including social insurance, excise taxes, customs duty, corporate profits tax and personal income taxes amounted to $39.5 million. Discussion This study examined location-based tourism expenditures and used input-output modelling to demonstrate the economic impacts of bird tourism on Alaska’s economy. The study provides a one-year snapshot about employment and income generated by bird tourism and shows how this economic impact varied across Alaska regions. Thus, the approach is different from eco- system service valuation that estimates net economic value changes [47]. Nature-based tourism is a growing economic sector that contributes to economic diversification [22,45,48]. Research continues to suggest that new tourism development, if designed with community insights, can also become sustainable and relevant in new ways within communities where tourism brings visitors and economic benefits [49]. We find the largest opportunities for sustainable economic growth through the develop- ment of nature-based tourism in the remote and underserved parts of Alaska. In regions with higher poverty rates, niche market development can play an important role for growing and

diversifying the economy. Bird tourism results in either new revenues to the region that other- wise would not have occurred, or revenues that in the absence of bird habitat conservation and associated visitation of healthy bird populations, would be lost. Especially in the remote regions, bird tourism provides critical cash flow and rare employment and income opportuni- ties for local communities interested in diversifying their local economies [36]. Our results illustrate that bird tourism brings substantial amounts of new money to Alaska’s economy, providing jobs, income, and government revenue. The presented economic impacts are likely a lower bound to the true economic impacts of bird tourism in Alaska. Part of the reason for this is the way in which tourism data are collected [23]. For example, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic halted most industrial-scale tour- ism in Alaska driven by the cruise ship industry, but independent travellers found ways to bol- ster tourism in some regions of the state [50]. Our results indicate that current tourism data collection efforts are particularly challenging for quantifying birding tourism because many Alaska birding destinations are not accessible by cruise ship and instead are more likely accessed by independent visitors. Historically, most studies of Alaska tourism relied on AVSP, designed to survey the cruise- ship-related portion of Alaska visitors [51–53]. As a result, the independent traveller segment of the tourism sector who is more likely to visit rural and remote areas of the state has small

sample sizes because the total number of visitors to these areas is small [23]. Thus, the indepen- dent traveller segment is underrepresented in AVSP hampering more comprehensive analysis of niche market development such as bird tourism. More in depth coverage of independent travellers would have been able to capture bird tourism spending in Alaska’s high-end birding destinations located in the Islands region [23,54,55]. To the contrary, the AVSP data does not distinguish between primary purpose birdwatch- ing and incidental bird observing [6,21]. Since there was no such distinction, we attributed all spending by bird watching visitors to bird tourism, regardless of how many other activities birders engaged in and regardless of underlying unknown motivations to come to Alaska in PLOS ONE Economic impact of bird tourism in Alaska PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268594 July 6, 2022 12 / 18