Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: Increasing Stormwater Awareness through Development of a Stormwater Footprint Game
EPA Grant Number: SU834711Title: Increasing Stormwater Awareness through Development of a Stormwater Footprint Game
Investigators: Zechman, Emily , Scott, Tommi Jo , Sprintson, Alex , Politte, Alyssa , Baltensperger, April , Kromann, Jenna , Barbour, Joshua , Giacomoni, Marcio , Collard, Sam , Saathoff, Sean
Institution: Texas A & M University
EPA Project Officer: Page, Angela
Phase: I
Project Period: August 15, 2010 through August 14, 2011
Project Amount: $10,000
RFA: P3 Awards: A National Student Design Competition for Sustainability Focusing on People, Prosperity and the Planet (2010) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: P3 Challenge Area - Sustainable and Healthy Communities , P3 Challenge Area - Safe and Sustainable Water Resources , Pollution Prevention/Sustainable Development , P3 Awards , Sustainable and Healthy Communities
Objective:
Urbanization leads to the degradation of watershed health, as increased areas of imperviousness produce alterations in the flow regime of receiving water bodies. While large infrastructure improvements, such as detention ponds, are typically implemented to manage excess runoff, decentralized approaches that utilize Low Impact Development (LID) design principles may better preserve the pre-development flow regime that can result in significant, long-term cost savings. Decentralized approaches, however, are more difficult to regulate, and homeowners and developers may be hesitant to adopt expensive technologies for stormwater control. Educational campaigns and tools have been used successfully in the past to help raise awareness about science and sustainability issues. For example, the Carbon Footprint is widely known for helping individuals assess their contribution to carbon emissions represented as an area of land. In this research, the Stormwater Footprint Quiz is created, implemented, and tested to evaluate the benefits of using a game to educate the public about stormwater sustainability and to change the behaviors of residents and landowners, who can significantly impact hydrologic sustainability if they are educated on the lot-level alternatives. The Quiz was developed by students from the Departments of Civil Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Communication, for educating lay persons about issues of stormwater sustainability and the impact of personal decision on hydrologic sustainability through LID options, such as permeable pavements, rainwater harvesting, and cluster development. A new stormwater sustainability metric, the hydrologic footprint residence (HFR), was recently introduced to measure more holistically the impacts of urbanization on the downstream residence. HFR measures changes to the flow regime as the area of land inundated for one unit of time in response to one rainfall event. It is the hypothesis of this work that HFR can be used to communicate the impacts of development decisions within the watershed more effectively than traditional stormwater metrics, such as peak flow. The Stormwater Footprint Quiz has been made available as a web-based application and an iPhone/iPod touch application. An experiment was fielded from students across campus through undergraduate and graduate courses to evaluate and compare the use of HFR and peak flow within the quiz for communicating to the general public about stormwater sustainability.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
We fielded an experiment in which 510 students from diverse backgrounds took the quiz and an associated survey. We compared different metrics for communicating the effects of development on stormwater and to evaluate the effectiveness of such games for changing participants’ knowledge and attitudes about low development and stormwater management. The results indicate that game play can indeed influence attitudes and improve knowledge about stormwater management and low-impact development. The results also suggest that the HFR offers a more understandable alternative to conventional engineering metrics. The results provide support for the value of games for communicating complex concepts in civil engineering to the general public and for the value of these games for helping the public make more sustainable decisions about stormwater management.
We assessed participants' knowledge about the causes of stormwater and the potential of LIDs to ameliorate stormwater problems. Game play produced marked improvement in participants' knowledge in these domains where their understanding before playing was less established. We also assessed participants' attitudes about stormwater management. After play participants were much more likely to report a willingness to act to support sustainable stormwater management practices.
Participants receiving HFR feedback were not any more likely than those receiving peak flow feedback to have higher knowledge scores about the causes or effects of stormwater and were no more likely than those receiving peak-flow feedback to report more sustainable attitudes about stormwater management, but they were more likely to have higher knowledge scores about the effects of flooding of different development alternatives. It is promising that different feedback produced different outcomes when participants then were asked to evaluate the effects on flooding of development technologies. The results offer tentative support for the HFR as a more understandable metric.
Conclusions:
The overall positive results suggest the efficacy of such games for not only communicating important concepts to the public but also as a tool for civil engineering research. In this case, results demonstrated that even this simple game had powerful effects on participants’ knowledge and attitudes about stormwater management. The results also allowed for the comparison of two alternative ways of communicating the consequences of development choices—the HFR and peak flow.
Future efforts should aim at developing a more powerful gaming platform where participants can not only input their current choices but also make different choices over time. The new tool should also allow for more flexibility in testing civil engineering concepts. Such a tool might not only make use of mathematical models of the stormwater but provide the human response to different models allowing for models that integrate environmental and human systems.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 3 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
public awareness tools; watershed management; non-structural best management practices; low impact development; web-based interactive gameThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.