Science Inventory

Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand Community Impacts of Changes in Water Quality

Citation:

Mulvaney, K., N. Merrill, AND M. Mazzotta. Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand Community Impacts of Changes in Water Quality. Chapter 2, Water Quality – Science, Assessments and Policy. InTech, Rijeka, Croatia, , 1-14, (2020). https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91480

Impact/Purpose:

Sense of place is the meaning that people attach to a place. Understanding sense of place and how it changes related to environmental improvement or degradation provides a helpful tool for translating impacts on people. There has only been minimal research conducted thus far on sense of place in relation to water quality. Here we present a scale developed specifically for that type of work.

Description:

Understanding people’s values for coastal and freshwater areas is critical for identifying concerns and motivating people to protect water resources and for informing management decisions. Sense of place is a social indicator that captures the relative value that different people hold for specific places. Its use in water quality assessments remains extremely limited but based on lessons from other environmental fields, sense of place offers promise as a tool for measuring an important aspect of the social value of water quality. In this chapter, we propose a quantitative sense-of-place scale and additional qualitative questions which can be used in conjunction with biophysical water quality data and water quality perceptions data to better understand how people’s values change with improvements or degradations in water quality.