Floatplane pilots' destination choices: a panel dataset, Alaska, 2015

This dataset was used for an economic valuation of ecosystem services affected by biological invasions of waterbodies in Alaska--the recreational damages by Alaska’s first known aquatic invasive species, Elodea spp (elodea). A survey with floatplane certified pilots residing in Alaska, asked pilots about the extent of continued flights to their 2015 destinations should these become invaded by elodea. The dataset is a panel dataset such as used in recreation demand models and compiled from multiple data sources: 1) survey with floatplane pilots that asked about flight patterns (destinations and frequency of flights) for a) the 2015 floatplane season, and b) a hypothetical scenario in which flight destinations are affected by an aquatic invasive plant creating flight safety hazards. The resulting panel dataset therefore shows the pre-invasion actual flight information combined with information on post-invasion contingent behavior as stated by respondents (Englin and Cameron, 1996; Hynes and Greene, 2013). Each respondent’s individual destinations were grouped into eight destination regions encompassing large watersheds (HUCs) defined by the National Hydrographic Dataset (NHD) (USGS, 2017). A no-fly destination alternative was included to account for the difference between pre- and post-invasion flight activity across all destination alternatives. A binary choice variable indicated to which region the pilot flew. Summarizing, the panel for each respondent includes nine rows (pre-invasion) for 8 destination alternatives as reported for 2015 and one no-fly alternative (for pre-invasion), and nine rows (8 destination regions and 1 no-fly) for post-invasion. A weight variable is used to scale up flight frequencies to each destination region for the entire population of floatplane pilots residing in Alaska. 2) The destination regions closely align with watershed boundaries of smaller scale game management units (GMU) for which data on hunting quality is available from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Hunting quality was assessed by calculating species-specific ratios of the reported number of animals killed to the reported number of hunters within a GMU. We calculate a kill per hunter ratios in order to capture both the recreation outcome and effort similar to catch per unit effort used in fisheries. It serves as an indirect measure for the abundance of target species (Skalski et al., 2005). If a GMU spanned multiple watershed boundaries we calculated the percent of the GMU area within each of the watersheds and used the percent to allocate the number of hunters and harvest among watersheds. Consequently, if two pilots flew to the same watershed region but their individual destinations fall into different GMUs, hunting quality will vary between the two pilots.