Abstract
Recently the environmental protection has become more pervasive and many locations have been protected through national and regional regulations. This protection is costly and its economic benefits are poorly investigated. The purpose of this paper is to report on preliminary results of a study conceived to cast light on these benefits. The paper analyzes the Tuscany residents socio-economic characteristics influencing the demand for outdoor recreation in environmental protected areas. We develop here two separate outdoor recreation models: (a) a dichotomous choice logit model to estimate the probability of participation conditional on household covariates; (b) a conditional logit model to estimate the probability of site selection conditional on site attributes. Finally, we report the estimated per trip welfare changes related to an enlargement protected areas.