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CONTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITIES TO THE HEALTH OF URBAN ECOSYSTEMS
Citation:
MORZILLO, A. T. AND A. FAIRBROTHER. CONTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITIES TO THE HEALTH OF URBAN ECOSYSTEMS. Presented at 2006 USEPA Annual Science Forum, Washington, DC, May 16 - 18, 2006.
Description:
With a majority of humans now living in urban and suburban areas, innovative methods are needed for land use planning to maintain healthy urban communities and ecosystems. As urban areas expand, an increasing number of human-environmental interactions take place, particularly along the urban-wildland interface. This research uses a specific example of a human-environment interaction to demonstrate how people make decisions affecting the environment, and how they perceive the ways in which the environment affects them, particularly within the residential context. The issue of focus is non-target wildlife exposure to and mortality as a result of household rodenticides use in two urban areas within California. During the past decade, wildlife biologists have observed mortality of several species including bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, and the federally-listed San Joaquin kit fox as a direct result of rodenticide poisoning. The EPA has confirmed that rodenticides pose a risk to non-target wildlife. However, it is not clear how rodenticides are used in adjacent urban areas and whether these poisonings are of general concern to the public. In collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS) and Endangered Species Recovery Program (ESRP, California State University, Stanislaus), we seek to understand the mechanisms by which rodenticides enter the environment as a result of household use in locations where wildlife mortality has occurred. Socioeconomic items of interest include information about household rodenticide use, whether people follow directions for product use, adequacy of safety information on packaging, human perceptions about target species, whether human awareness exists about non-target wildlife concerns, and demographics such as household income and residential tenure. Using a geographic information system, socioeconomic data will be linked to telemetry data collected by NPS and ESRP to identify locations where wildlife may have an increased risk of exposure to rodenticides as a consequence of specific types of human activities, social factors, or environmental awareness. This approach can be adapted for other household and wildlife risk analyses in addition to pesticide use, at various jurisdictional levels or geographic levels.