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Facing public concern over costs related to top predator reintroduction and conservation, ecosystem services such as ecotourism are often used to evoke benefits that outweigh or offset those costs. Quantifying these benefits using rigorous scientific methods can provide confidence to policy makers and other stakeholders that predators can in fact deliver positive outcomes to people living with them. However, evaluation of these benefits is often anecdotal or qualitative, and empirical quantifications are rare. (2) In coastal marine ecosystems, sea otter reintroduction is seen as a conservation success to some, but a bane to others. Sea otters’ contribution to tourism revenue is touted as a crucial ecosystem service benefit to offset the loss of shellfish harvesting and associated revenue, but remains unquantified, weakening the favourable reception of conservation action. (3) The potential economic benefits of sea otters associated with tourism and the extent to which benefits are realized were evaluated based on (a) choice experiment surveys of tourists and (b) interviews with tourism operators in British Columbia. (4) Sea otters were a strong factor in people’s choices regarding wildlife viewing and sea otters could have large benefits for local economies. Alongside socio-economic characteristics, tourism experience influences tourists’ preferences. Tourism operators did not perceive sea otters as strongly influencing tourist choice, highlighting the gap that can occur between the perception and reality of tourist preferences, leading to missed opportunities for the alignment of economic development with conservation actions

Most ecosystems are subject to both natural and human disturbances that can combine to influence populations and assemblages in complex ways. Assessing the relative influences and combined impacts of natural and human disturbance is crucial for managing human uses of ecosystems against the backdrop of their natural variability. We evaluated the separate and combined influences of disturbance from storm waves and disturbance associated with human trampling of rocky shores by conducting an experiment mimicking controlled levels of trampling at sites with different wave exposures, and before and after a major storm event in central California, USA. Results show that trampling and storm waves affected the same taxa and have comparable and additive effects on rocky shore assemblages. Both disturbance types caused significant reduction in percent cover of mussels and erect macroalgae, and resulted in significant re-organization of assemblages associated with these habitat-forming taxa. A single extreme storm event caused similar percent cover losses of mussels and erect macroalgae as did 6–12 months of trampling. Contrary to a predicted synergistic effect of trampling and storm damage, we found that impacts from each disturbance combined additively. Mussel beds in wave-exposed sites are more vulnerable to trampling impacts than algal beds at protected sites. Mussels and erect macroalgae recovered within five years after trampling stopped. These results suggest that impacts from local human use can be reversed in relatively short time frames, and that cumulative impacts can be reduced by setting recreational carrying capacities more conservatively when ecosystems are already exposed to frequent and/or intense natural disturbances.