Valoración ambiental del recurso vegetal de la Parroquia San Juan, cantón Riobamba.

Abstract

The objective of this research was to determine the environmental value of the plant resource of San Juan parish in Riobamba canton. It started with the characterization of the services through the development of maps. That allowed informing the planning and management of land use to define the link that exists between the benefit of the service provided by the plant ecosystems with the importance and frequency of use thereof given by the direct local user. It also identifies within the evaluations, the services modified by the different social and geographical factors. For the identification of the services, interviews were carried out with the "stakeholders" where 20 relevant services were obtained; for which the social and geographical value were defined by means of non-parametric tests, carrying out 326 surveys aimed at the population that inhabits the parish seat. It was shown that stakeholders were in the ability to differentiate the importance with the frequency of use of the resource and this occurs by: location, academic level, experiences etc. The results showed that high values were attributed to tangible services; In addition, the inferential analytical method was applied to determine the conservation surplus (WTP) that will depend on the economic income and the level of education, where its weighted average is 0.81 USD, being the annual payment for forest conservation. The total economic value (TEV) of the plant resource under study reaches USD 174,363,002.80 along the year. During this research, it was also proposed to increase forest production through the method of change in the production in which it was obtained a VET of the vegetal resource projected to 5 years with a value of 871,780,699.58 USD. The ecosystem services provided by the vegetation that were valued revealed the attributes that the services present, being likely to have positive effects on local or governmental decision making.