Due to the public good nature of many of mangrove’s ecosystem services, markets for them do not exist and there is limited potential to manage them with conventional markets. Moreover, because of the difficulties in estimating the value of these non-marketed services, mangroves are often undervalued in benefit cost analysis of conservation versus commercial land uses causing their degradation and loss. With the goal of supporting the current efforts of the government of Costa Rica to develop a new PES scheme that include these ecosystems, as well as other policy initiatives on wetlands conservation and restoration, we applied a hybrid approach to estimate the value of ecosystem services from mangrove forests in the Gulf of Nicoya. Our method consists of traditional benefit transfer and expert modified benefit transfer for 11 ecosystem services, and the application of more specific methods to estimate three of those ecosystem services (i.e. climate regulation, fisheries and coastal protection). Using traditional benefit transfer, we estimated the total economic value of ecosystem services of mangroves in the Gulf of Nicoya in $812 million per year (median=$88 million/year), and the total mean value of the ecosystem services provided by all the mangroves in Costa Rica as $1.5 billion per year (median=$160 million/year). By applying the expert modified benefit transfer we estimated that the mean total value of the mangrove forests of the Gulf of Nicoya is $470 million per year, and a median value of $75 million per year. Combining the three different valuation technics, we calculated the mean total value of the ecosystem services from mangrove forests in the Gulf of Nicoya in $408 million per year, and a median total value of $86 million. Considering the median total value of ecosystem services from mangroves, it represents 0.16% of the GDP in Costa Rica in 2015.

由于许多红树林生态系统服务具有公益性，因此不存在针对它们的市场，利用传统市场进行管理的潜力有限。此外，由于难以估算这些非市场服务的价值，因此在保护与商业土地利用的利益成本分析中，红树林常常被低估，从而导致其退化和损失。为了支持哥斯达黎加政府当前的努力，以开发包括这些生态系统的新的生态系统服务计划，以及其他有关湿地保护和恢复的政策举措，我们采用了一种混合方法来估算哥斯达黎加政府的生态系统服务价值。尼科亚湾的红树林。我们的方法包括针对11种生态系统服务的传统收益转移和专家修正收益转移，以及应用更具体的方法来估算其中三种生态系统服务（即气候调节，渔业和沿海保护）。使用传统的利益转移，我们估计尼科亚湾红树林的生态系统服务的总经济价值为每年8.12亿美元（中位数= 8800万美元/年），以及该州所有红树林提供的生态系统服务的总平均价值。哥斯达黎加每年为15亿美元（中位数= 1.6亿美元/年）。通过应用专家调整的收益转移，我们估计尼科亚湾红树林的平均总价值为每年4.7亿美元，中位数为每年7500万美元。结合三种不同的评估技术，我们计算了来自尼科亚湾红树林的生态系统服务的平均总价值，每年为4.08亿美元，中位数总值为8600万美元。考虑到来自红树林的生态系统服务总价值的中位数，它代表了哥斯达黎加2015年GDP的0.16％。