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Public Values Related to the Santa Cruz River
Citation:
WEBER, M. Public Values Related to the Santa Cruz River. Presented at Submitted for SAHRA Annual Mtg, Tucson , AZ, September 24, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
The Santa Cruz Basin is a focus geography for EPA Southwestern ecosystem services research, and the focal resource is water. The goal of one component of the Santa Cruz effort is to characterize the ways in which basin residents value the river, and environmental resources related to the river. This will help inform tradeoffs in river management. Focus groups and individual interviews will assist development of a survey that will collect public value data via a choice experiment. Parallel studies in other basins receiving EPA study may follow, in order to gain broader perspective of what features of rivers are important to stakeholders and the public. A planned partner in this research is the Sonoran Institute, which is developing a ‘health assessment’ for the Santa Cruz River based on aquatic and riparian conditions. This work is also planned to be one part of a effort led by USGS to develop an ‘ecosystem portfolio model’ for the basin.
