Can urban coyotes have a benefit to people?

Seattle is full of non-native and invasive species that coyotes are likely eating. These species often have negative impacts on humans. For example, Norway black rats (Rattus rattus) cause massive infrastructure destruction and are vectors for numerous zoonotic diseases and rabbits eat gardens and also destroy infrastructure. Using the dietary information obtained from scats, we can create an average diet for the entire coyote population in Seattle. We can then use this, in addition to some knowledge on coyote metabolism, to understand how many of each prey item coyotes are eating. We can also assign monetary values to each prey type that coyotes remove. For example, for rats, we can calculate a monetary value based on extermination costs and the average number of individuals removed per extermination event. We can then summarize all these values across the population and determine a monetary benefit derived from coyote predation.