Wildlife management areas (WMAs) provide a wide range of ecosystem services. Among these services, hunting and fishing often make the most obvious contribution to local and state economies through the expenditures of the hunters and anglers. However, the total economic contributions of WMAs also include other forms of recreation that are generally less visible, unlicensed, and less well understood. Quantifying the size of the economic contribution from all recreationists can inform decisions about investment in and management of public lands. To this end, we estimated the direct, indirect, and induced economic contributions of recreation on protected land managed by the state of North Carolina (NC) primarily for hunting, fishing, and wildlife conservation (hereafter WMAs). We collected data on visitation and conducted in-person intercept surveys at 9 WMAs to estimate the number of visits and expenditures per visit for people engaged in activities that required licenses (e.g., hunting) and activities that did not (e.g., hiking and bird watching). We estimated annual visitation on the 9 study WMAs, accounting for differences in location, hunting season, day of the week, and weather. We then predicted annual visitation at all 94 WMAs in NC using a predictive regression model. Most visitors did not engage in any licensed activities, and those visitors spent more per trip on average ($119.83) and had greater variability in expenses than visitors engaged in licensed activities ($84.19). We used the estimates of total annual visits, expenditures per visit, and the distribution of those expenditures across sectors to calculate the economic contribution of recreation on each of the 9 study WMAs and on the entire WMA system in NC. Recreation was responsible for approximately 2200 jobs, $84 million USD in annual labor income, and $140 million USD in value added annually in NC. The majority of this contribution was due to visits made by users not engage in licensed uses of WMAs, as those users were more numerous, spent more per trip, and were more likely to visit WMAs in peri-urban areas with more economic linkages than rural areas.

野生动物管理区 (WMA) 提供广泛的生态系统服务。在这些服务中，狩猎和捕鱼通常通过猎人和垂钓者的支出对地方和州经济做出最明显的贡献。然而，WMA 的总经济贡献还包括其他形式的娱乐活动，这些娱乐活动通常不那么明显、未经许可且不太为人所知。量化所有游憩者的经济贡献大小可以为有关公共土地投资和管理的决策提供信息。为此，我们估计了北卡罗来纳州 (NC) 管理的受保护土地上的娱乐活动的直接、间接和诱导经济贡献，主要用于狩猎、捕鱼和野生动物保护（以下简称 WMA）。我们收集了访问数据，并在 9 个 WMA 进行了现场拦截调查，以估计从事需要许可证的活动（例如狩猎）和不需要许可证的活动（例如远足和观鸟）的人的访问次数和每次访问的支出）。我们估计了 9 个研究 WMA 的年度访问量，考虑了位置、狩猎季节、星期几和天气的差异。然后，我们使用预测回归模型预测了北卡罗来纳州所有 94 个 WMA 的年度访问量。大多数游客没有参与任何获得许可的活动，这些游客平均每次旅行花费更多（119.83 美元），并且费用的可变性比从事许可活动的游客（84.19 美元）更大。我们使用了每年总访问量、每次访问支出、以及这些支出在各部门之间的分布，以计算娱乐对 9 个研究 WMA 和北卡罗来纳州整个 WMA 系统的经济贡献。在北卡罗来纳州，娱乐活动提供了大约 2200 个工作岗位、8400 万美元的年劳动收入和 1.4 亿美元的附加值。这一贡献的大部分是由于未参与 WMA 许可使用的用户的访问，因为这些用户数量更多，每次旅行花费更多，并且更有可能访问经济联系比农村更多的城郊地区的 WMA领域。