INFLUENCE OF WATER QUALITY ON SENSE OF PLACE IN COASTAL RECREATION AREAS
Citation:
Mulvaney, K., N. Merrill, J. Twichell, AND M. Mazzotta. INFLUENCE OF WATER QUALITY ON SENSE OF PLACE IN COASTAL RECREATION AREAS. International Symposium on Society and Resource Management (ISSRM), Oshkosh, Wisconsin, June 02 - 07, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
"Sense of place" is a measurement of how special an area is to an individual. It is one way to measure the value of different locations for people. This study sought to understand how sense of place is affected by water pollution.
Description:
Sense of place has been identified as a cultural ecosystem service for use in valuation, yet, to date, there has been little assessment of sense of place for coastal areas and the impact of water quality degradation on those attitudes. In a recent survey on coastal recreation in New England sent to more than 9,000 randomly selected addresses (response rate ~16%), we piloted a sense-of-place scale for coastal recreation areas. The scale includes questions about place attachment, place identity, and place dependence that were built from survey questions developed for other freshwater or recreational areas and were validated with qualitative open-ended questions. Participants were surveyed about coastal recreation in general as well as more specific questions about their most recent recreational trips, including specific information about site location, water quality perceptions, sense of place, trip characteristics, and demographics. Analysis of the integrated qualitative and quantitative data suggests that the sense-of-place scale was useful for capturing place-specific social values and meanings of coastal areas. This study also explored how water quality affects sense of place for coastal recreation areas. To investigate this relationship, we used a surveyed water quality perception scale as well as geospatial data for water quality impairments (state 303(d) lists) and beach closure data (bacterial counts) for the participant-identified recreation locations. The results indicate a positive relationship between sense of place and water quality at the identified recreation sites in which areas with better water quality had higher sense of attitudes associated with them. This sense-of-place measure provides a metric for calculating the social value of outdoor recreation areas that depend on environmental management or conservation. Further, because this approach applies geospatially linked data to synthesize social and biophysical data, it can improve place-based conservation and may provide valuable insights about the social value for coastal areas.