Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
water-efficient, desert-like landscapes appear to leave local residents thinking
they use relatively small amounts of water. In these areas, descriptive information
about actual resource use (e.g., indicating high rates relative to others) and
associated evaluative signals (e.g., a sad-face emoticon to suggest that high
consumptions rates are bad) could motivate behavior change by raising awareness,
instilling a sense of efficacy, and establishing the social expectation for conserva-
tion (Schultz et al. 2007 ).
As a whole, targeted outreach programs illustrating high consumption rates in
areas people underestimate their usage can enhance conservation through the
integration of diverse spatially referenced datasets that represent environmental
conditions along with perceptions or other human judgments. In our neighborhood
typology, residents most underestimated their water use in areas with relatively
drought-tolerant landscapes. This finding suggests that residents who are sur-
rounded by 'xeric' (dry) landscapes may be prone to view their water use as low,
while those in grassy, 'mesic' (wet) areas with lots of green vegetation may more
accurately perceive their water use rates. This result is not surprising since a
popular conservation strategy in many arid cities is to promote xeric landscapes
that encompass rock groundcover and drought-tolerant plants, as opposed to tradi-
tional mesic lawns, because of their water-saving potential (Martin 2001 ).
Yet simply changing the vegetation and groundcover in yards may not be sufficient
for reducing demand, as indicated by highly consumptive neighborhoods with xeric
landscapes in our study.
With respect to this finding, it is relevant to note that grassy yards have been
shown to significantly increase water demand across all Phoenix neighborhoods,
although pools and lot size had substantially larger effects than groundcover in a
study of residential demand by Wentz and Gober ( 2007 ). Thus, although low
demand among heavily vegetated neighborhoods in our intensive sample may not
fully represent city-wide trends, factors other than grass or vegetative cover seem to
be more important determinants of demand. While we found that landscaping
factors may influence the accuracy of perceptions about residential water use, our
study and others (Martin 2001 ; Balling and Gober 2007 ) indicate that people's
behavioral water-management practices critically affect consumption rates above
and beyond both groundcover or vegetation and irrigation technologies. In particu-
lar, residents tend to over-water drought-tolerant landscapes due to the common use
of automated systems to irrigate xeric yards with rock groundcover.
While automated technologies could be managed to enhance the efficiency of
irrigation, they are often not set or changed to meet the minimum plant needs or to
respond to current, local climate conditions (Balling and Gober 2007 ). In high
demand areas with relatively xeric landscapes, effective conservation efforts might
entail providing specific information on how best to irrigate yards with an auto-
mated system or perhaps marketing 'smart' irrigation timers to enhance water-use
efficiency. This new 'smart' technology removes some of the possibility for human
error in over-watering yards by reading weather information (e.g., temperatures)
from satellites to automatically adjust the irrigation schedule based on local climate
conditions (e.g., how much it has rained recently).
Search WWH ::




Custom Search