From fields to flyways: Public willingness to pay for migratory bird habitat restoration in California

California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requires groundwater basins to achieve sustainable use by 2040, a transition projected to retire 500,000 to 1 million acres of irrigated farmland. Virtually all of this retired land will be in California’s great Central Valley, an agricultural powerhouse and part of the Pacific Flyway, a major avian migration route. In California, over 95% of native wetlands and 60% of grasslands and oak savannahs have been lost, making SGMA-driven land retirement a rare opportunity to restore wildlife habitat at scale. Realizing this opportunity requires substantial public investment, yet the public value of habitat restoration on retired farmland remains unquantified, as well as how the public sees the difference between wetland and dryland habitats, both for the varying species they support but also their co-benefits such as water use and groundwater recharge. We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) of California households for converting SGMA-retired farmland to permanent wetland and dryland habitat using a contingent valuation (CV) approach. We find mean WTP of approximately $50 to $67 per household for wetland restoration and $49 to $61 for dryland restoration, aggregating conservatively to one-time statewide benefits of $563 million to $773 million depending on program type, estimation approach, and distributional assumptions. These results demonstrate broad public support for habitat restoration on SGMA-retired farmland and provide an empirical basis for evaluating and allocating public investment across competing restoration alternatives.