National Park Visitors as a Funding Source for Cross-boundary and Landscape-Scale Wildlife Conservation
Need and opportunity
Wildlife viewing is a popular activity for many visitors to national parks. Yet, many of the species that visitors want to see the most are wide-ranging and require large intact landscapes that span well beyond park boundaries for their survival. Areas outside of parks, like private working lands, are also the most susceptible to habitat loss and fragmentation due to land-use changes. Given the large visitation to national parks and the interest in wildlife viewing, national park visitors are a potential untapped source of funding for cross-boundary, landscape-scale conservation efforts. In this project, we wanted to understand the importance of wildlife viewing to national park visitors, how much they spend to visit national parks, and their support for hypothetical options for raising revenue to support landscape-scale conservation efforts.
Research findings
In May 2025 we published a new study in Society for Conservation Biology with our key findings:
Benefits from wildlife viewing in these parks are substantial and depend on successful protection of wide-ranging species abundance.
Asking park visitors to fund conservation has broad support from park visitors and may have minimal effects on park visitation rates.
Funding collected from park visitors could help maintain the quality of visitors’ experiences and the wildlife populations on which those experiences depend.
Read the research brief here.
Research background
In the summer of 2022, we surveyed 991 visitors to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. We found that viewing wildlife was the primary reason to visit the parks for roughly 16% of visitors and one of several primary reasons for 62%. Only 3% said wildlife viewing was not a reason to visit. Overall, we estimated that wildlife viewing in these parks generates millions in net economic value and visitors support multiple options for contributing themselves towards large-landscape conservation, including conservation taxes and fees. Even the collection of modest fees could generate tens of millions of dollars in additional funds for conservation. Visitors to national parks are largely untapped sources of conservation funding and our results demonstrate how tapping into this funding could result in a potential win-win for wildlife viewers and conservation efforts beyond park boundaries.
Where we’re going
We look forward to continuing the conversation with our team and collaborators about this project, and aim to support future evaluation efforts on alternative and novel approaches to wildlife conservation funding.
Team members
Hilary Byerly Flint
Hilary is a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming. She studies how people manage and value the natural environment—particularly public benefits, like biodiversity conservation and risk mitigation, from private lands. She is currently leading a multi-year project focused on incentivizing habitat conservation on private lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Hilary is based in Jackson, WY.
Drew Bennett
Drew is the Whitney MacMillan Professor of Practice of Private Lands Stewardship in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Drew's work focuses on strategies to balance agricultural production and the conservation of wildlife and other natural resources on private lands in the American West. He has previously worked with The Nature Conservancy on a cattle ranch in eastern Colorado and for the Mesa Land Trust in western Colorado.
