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River metrics by the public, for the public

Managing rivers in society’s best interest requires data on river condition. However, the complexity of river ecosystems, combined with finite budgets for river monitoring and modeling, mean difficult choices are necessary regarding what information will be available. Typically, decisions of "w...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Weber, Matthew A., Ringold, Paul L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6505747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31067256
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214986
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author Weber, Matthew A.
Ringold, Paul L.
author_facet Weber, Matthew A.
Ringold, Paul L.
author_sort Weber, Matthew A.
collection PubMed
description Managing rivers in society’s best interest requires data on river condition. However, the complexity of river ecosystems, combined with finite budgets for river monitoring and modeling, mean difficult choices are necessary regarding what information will be available. Typically, decisions of "what to measure" are left to natural scientists. However, knowledge of public appetite for different types of information helps ensure river data is useful to society. We investigated public interest in rivers directly, engaging nearly one hundred urban and rural participants in a combination of focus groups and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on concepts of "final" ecosystem services developed in environmental economics, we moved discussions past commonly mentioned stressors, such as pollution, to actual river features important in and of themselves. Participant feedback reflected extensive thought on river issues, in contrast to a stereotype that the public is ambivalent about environmental conditions. Interests were also broad, encompassing water quality and quantity, fish and wildlife, vegetation, and human features. Results show consolidation around relatively few themes despite diverse sociodemographics. Themes were interpreted into distilled, specific metrics to make public feedback as useful as possible for water resources monitoring, modeling, and management. Our research provides detailed, methodically generated hypotheses regarding river themes and metrics of public interest that should be considered as part of the tradeoffs inherent in river monitoring design. Results compared reasonably well to river attributes emphasized in river restoration environmental valuation reviews, with some differences. Future research could test our hypotheses with large-sample surveys.
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spelling pubmed-65057472019-05-23 River metrics by the public, for the public Weber, Matthew A. Ringold, Paul L. PLoS One Research Article Managing rivers in society’s best interest requires data on river condition. However, the complexity of river ecosystems, combined with finite budgets for river monitoring and modeling, mean difficult choices are necessary regarding what information will be available. Typically, decisions of "what to measure" are left to natural scientists. However, knowledge of public appetite for different types of information helps ensure river data is useful to society. We investigated public interest in rivers directly, engaging nearly one hundred urban and rural participants in a combination of focus groups and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on concepts of "final" ecosystem services developed in environmental economics, we moved discussions past commonly mentioned stressors, such as pollution, to actual river features important in and of themselves. Participant feedback reflected extensive thought on river issues, in contrast to a stereotype that the public is ambivalent about environmental conditions. Interests were also broad, encompassing water quality and quantity, fish and wildlife, vegetation, and human features. Results show consolidation around relatively few themes despite diverse sociodemographics. Themes were interpreted into distilled, specific metrics to make public feedback as useful as possible for water resources monitoring, modeling, and management. Our research provides detailed, methodically generated hypotheses regarding river themes and metrics of public interest that should be considered as part of the tradeoffs inherent in river monitoring design. Results compared reasonably well to river attributes emphasized in river restoration environmental valuation reviews, with some differences. Future research could test our hypotheses with large-sample surveys. Public Library of Science 2019-05-08 /pmc/articles/PMC6505747/ /pubmed/31067256 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214986 Text en https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) public domain dedication.
spellingShingle Research Article
Weber, Matthew A.
Ringold, Paul L.
River metrics by the public, for the public
title River metrics by the public, for the public
title_full River metrics by the public, for the public
title_fullStr River metrics by the public, for the public
title_full_unstemmed River metrics by the public, for the public
title_short River metrics by the public, for the public
title_sort river metrics by the public, for the public
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6505747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31067256
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214986
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