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Building an Understanding of Coastal Water Quality Perceptions of Marine Recreationists
Citation:
Mulvaney, K., N. Merrill, M. Mazzotta, AND J. Sawyer. Building an Understanding of Coastal Water Quality Perceptions of Marine Recreationists. International Association for Society and Natural Resources, NA, Virtual, June 20 - 24, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
People make decisions about where to recreate based, in part, on how the perceive the quality of the water to be at a site. Very little is known about how people's perceptions of water quality are influenced and how well those perceptions reflect biophysical monitoring data. Our work combines different social science methods to capture how coastal users' perceptions of water quality are built and how well those perceptions match different biophysical data types, including water clarity and bacterial contamination.
Description:
When investigating distances traveled or other behavior changes related to water quality improvements or degradation, most analyses are based on biophysical measurements of the water quality; however, marine recreationists ultimately choose the locations for their activities based on their perceptions of the sites. Using a survey of marine recreationists, we sought to understand how the measured perceptions of water quality match the available biophysical data in the coastal waters of New England, USA. We applied data from the survey and complementary qualitative data collected in seven focus groups to understand the underlying building blocks of those perceptions. We found that perceptions largely matched biophysical measurements of the coastal recreation sites’ water quality, but that some measurements were more closely related. Water clarity had the greatest influence on overall water quality perceptions, but other characteristics of both the water and the shoreline influenced the perceptions of the water quality at a site and the activities chosen for recreation. While the perceptions were related to the spatially available biophysical data, for many of the most salient attributes, such as trash in the water and along the shoreline, presence of macroalgae, and water color, there is no available biophysical data available at spatially relevant scales. At most sites, most of the water quality attributes were consistent with one another, indicating that people perceived that places where the water quality is most degraded, it is degraded for multiple reasons and where it is cleanest for one attribute, it is often cleanest for all.
