Julia Fennell ’21
Three CC and two University of Northern Colorado students joined their professors, Dr. Guanyi Yang, CC Assistant Professor of Economics and Business, and Dr. Mark Eiswerth ’82, Professor of Economics at UNC and Visiting Professor at CC, on a three-day trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park to research dark sky tourism, the practice of traveling to locations without light pollution in order to see the night sky.
“I have been very concerned about the negative impacts of night light pollution for quite some time now,” says Eiswerth, who majored in Economics at CC. “Even aside from potential human health and ecological impacts, it is very sad to me that we, as well as our children and grandchildren, are not able to see stars at night in the same way that our parents and grandparents may have been able to. It is hard to fathom an opportunity that you are missing when you cannot even see the opportunity!”
The idea for this project started with the State of the Rockies Project, which works to enhance the understanding of and address socio-environmental challenges in the Rocky Mountain West. The survey asked participants how important it is to provide opportunities for people to see stars at night without light pollution. Almost 70% of respondents said it was important. The State of the Rockies Project then reached out to Yang and asked him to lead one of the research teams investigating the importance of dark sky conservation, which the State of the Rockies Project sponsored.
Eiswerth has been a year-long visitor at CC for the past two years. Yang learned about his research investigating the tourism values of clean water conservation and found the methodology extremely interesting, so he reached out, and the two professors brainstormed ways to create a similar, but more precise, survey and estimation method for the tourism impact of dark sky conservation.
“After recruiting a group of students for the cause for the past summer, we decided to explore three dimensions: financial aspects of dark sky conservation, human aspects, and biodiversity,” Yang says.
The group of students included CC students Jacob McDougall ’24, Liam Mullen ’25, and Benjamin Slater ’26.
For the financial aspect of the research project, the team focused on dark sky tourism.
“After researching the Dark Sky Conservation, we learned that the Sand Dunes is certified by the International Dark Sky Association with the Gold Level conservation effort,” Yang says. “The county is also one of the less economically prosperous counties in the state. This creates a potential conflict. Dark Sky Conservation prevents night light usage, often positively correlated to economic development. But if such an effort also brings in additional tourism revenue, we can find an interesting balance that protects the night sky and gains financial returns to the local area.”
Following this discovery, Mullen, the lead student researcher, found very limited study and work evaluating the economic impact of dark sky tourism, despite dark sky tourism being a rapidly growing trend, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Mullen was in charge of determining what specific permit they would need to obtain from the National Park Service (NPS), as well as ensuring their specific research and timeline was approved by the NPS. Yang, Eiswerth, and Mullen worked together to create the proposal for a NPS permit to conduct their research.
“Overall, I learned a lot from the preparation of the project,” Mullen says. “Helping to draft the proposal gave me a look at what goes into presenting research ideas for things like grants and other sources of funding. It also gave me a better look into the specific aspects of the research design, and—through the literature review—a better understanding of previous research of a similar sort. I expect to learn a lot more about the entire research process by working on the other aspects of the project.”
Mullen was Yang’s student, advisee, and teaching assistant for the last year. Last summer, he was a State of the Rockies Fellow and traveled around the Rocky Mountain region conducting the public land survey.
“In addition to learning more about perceptions of dark skies, my work with the State of the Rockies Project made me much more comfortable approaching people with surveys,” says Mullen, an Economics major. “After spending a summer getting used to going up to people out of the blue, it felt like second nature when I did it at the Sand Dunes.”
The students collected 371 surveys over three days from tourists at the Great Sand Dunes National Park. The survey asked park visitors about their current and previous visits to the park and how changes in the sky quality might impact future visits, as well as to compare the quality of the night sky to a location familiar to them. Park visitors were also asked how much they spend during their trips, which helps the research team estimate potential changes in tourism revenue depending on the quality of the night sky.
“I was pleasantly surprised by how receptive tourists were to fill out our surveys,” says McDougall, a Business, Economics, and Society major. “I learned how challenging surveying for research can be. I think I will be more receptive to fill out other surveys in the future now that I know how important this research method is in understanding public behavior.”
Each day, the research team arrived at the park at 9 a.m., right as the Visitor’s Center was opening. Because it was Block Break, the team saw several CC students at the Sand Dunes.
“I’m a huge advocate for national parks and an avid traveler so the opportunity to spend all day at a national park as well as explore a new area of the state all while meeting students and professors within the Economics Department was an amazing experience,” says Slater, an Economics major who took two classes with Eiswerth last year and was very happy to have the opportunity to work with him again. “It felt like the perfect convergence of Block Break and productivity.”
“I think the most important thing was to stay confident and put yourself out there when it comes to approaching strangers,” says Slater. “When you’re talking to over a hundred families every day and hear ten ‘nos’ in a row it can feel a little demoralizing. I found pushing past that was extremely important to completing the job successfully.”
After taking a lunch break around noon, the team would resume surveying into the evening, and then had the opportunity to explore the surrounding area of Alamosa in the San Luis Valley. While on the trip, the team was solely focused on collecting enough surveys to ensure they have a sufficient sample size for good data analysis. Still, the team made sure they spent at least one night observing the dark skies at the Great Sand Dunes, which reminded them how important their work is.
“I felt like I learned a bit more about conducting survey-based research from the repetition over the three days, and I think that the work at the Sand Dunes will be a springboard to a lot of future learning,” Mullen says. “It was nice to meet and work with people from a different school and with different specific interests related to economics.”
One of the goals for this project was to gather data on how much visitors spend during their trips, which helps the team estimate potential changes in tourism revenue depending on the quality of the dark skies. The research team is still analyzing data, but from preliminary reviews of the survey, people consistently rated the sky quality as high. Sky quality is defined as the stars they can see.
“They appreciated their ability to see the Milky Way in the Sand Dunes at night,” Yang says. “Most people were not aware of the Gold Level Dark Sky Designation of the park. Yet, many visitors we surveyed repeatedly visit the park for Dark Sky reasons, and a noticeable fraction of them will change their future visitation if the night sky were polluted with city lights.”
“It’s hard to draw conclusions right now as we’re still in the process of interpreting data and assembling models,” says Slater. “But as someone who took down responses and transcribed survey data, I was surprised to see how important dark sky parks were to patrons.”
“After analyzing over one hundred surveys, I would say that the amount that park attendees spent daily, and their transportation expenses, varied greatly,” McDougall says. “I can recall that some respondents stated that they spent as little as $10-20 daily, while some indicated that they spent several hundreds to thousands of dollars for transportation-related expenses.”
The student researchers are currently mapping the satellite data, which is the measurement for night light pollution, with the survey data. Once that is finished, the team will be able to conduct statistical causal inference estimating the impact of night light pollution on tourism behaviors. They will arrange the survey information with Sand Dune Park’s data on annual visitations, and backout the economic loss to the region for various levels of night light pollution in the area.
McDougall graduates in May, but Slater and Mullen will continue working on the next steps of the project with Yang and Eiswerth.
“Ben, Jacob, and Liam worked beyond my expectations in the field, connecting with tourists and successfully collecting nearly four hundred copies of surveys, with two other students from UNC,” Yang says. “Since returning, all three of them worked on transcribing physical surveys into digital values and created a database for the next analysis step.”
Willow Ma ’24, who is working in the subproject studying human impact of light pollution, is currently teaching Slater and Mullen how to map the satellite data produced by The Earth Observation Group, specifically the nighttime Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite data, to the surveys they collected.
Dark sky tourism is becoming increasingly popular. Last year, Colorado State Gov. Jared Polis signed the Support Dark Sky Designation And Promotion In Colorado Act. This was a step towards southern Colorado becoming the largest Dark Sky Reserve in the world. The International Dark Sky Association certifies dark sky areas and places across the world, though many national parks in the United States have dark sky areas, even if they aren’t certified. Over 200 places have been certified since 2001 and there are currently 15 designated locations in Colorado. In 2021, the Curecanti National Recreation Area in Gunnison, Colorado, was announced as an International Dark Sky Park and Crestone, Nucla, and Naturita, Colorado, were designated as an International Dark Sky Community.
“I think this experience was a great way for me to understand the importance of adequate survey design,” McDougall says. “In Block 3, I began my Business, Economics, and Society thesis on understanding consumer perceptions and motivations to purchase fast fashion or more sustainable alternatives and had to create a survey for my research. This experience with Guanyi and Mark truly helped me get a better understanding of surveying and I thank them both for this incredible opportunity!”
“Our work at the Sand Dunes provided an unusual opportunity for faculty and students from two different Colorado institutions of higher education to join forces in an applied research project with a regional focus,” Eiswerth says. “Our work as a team is not only quite productive, but very enjoyable and allows all of us to build skills in communicating with the public. One of the students indicated to me that the survey trip even changed their idea of what it is they might like to do after graduation – that’s incredible. Based on the feedback I have received, demand is high for more collaborative, multi-institution, applied, regional efforts like this. For me this is a very special experience, and that’s due mostly to the passions and commitment of everyone involved on the team.”
The team expects to write a research article for publication in a peer reviewed economics journal by the end of the academic year, as well as a policy briefing that the Sand Dunes Park and the State of the Rockies requested.
More information about the project will be shared shortly, but some of the preliminary work is available in the State of the Rockies magazine.