DISES: Valuing and managing engineered ecosystems: Primary and secondary services provided by stormwater ponds in urban landscapes

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Stormwater wet ponds (SWPs) capture rainwater that runs off urban and suburban landscapes before it enters natural waters like lakes or rivers. SWPs are mainly built for flood control and water quality benefits, but they can also improve people’s daily lives. For example, SWPs can add recreational area and increase home values in a neighborhood. This project combines environmental, economic, and social research to understand how human behaviors and management of SWPs interact with natural processes in SWPs. These interactions influence the benefits that SWPs provide to people and nature. The project will investigate tradeoffs in how management affects algal blooms and other SWP water quality issues. Researchers will also study how people value SWPs and estimate their effect on the sales price of nearby homes. Results will be combined to find ways to increase the ecological, social, and economic value that SWPs provide to people. The project will quantify ecosystem services provided by SWPs such as improved water quality and pollutant removal, enhanced property values, and increased biodiversity. The benefits and tradeoffs in ecosystem services will be documented through research on variations in social norms, values, and decisions across different social levels (from the individual to the community) and how these variations interact with ecological processes. Further, this research will occur at local and regional scales to 1) reveal differences in perceptions and values of SWPs across different levels of society and governance, 2) quantify ecosystem services (nutrient removal, protection from harmful algal blooms, carbon sequestration) provided by SWPs, and 3) establish societal preferences for these services. In the social science realm, economists and anthropologists will use a combination of surveys, focus groups, and hedonic housing models to identify the value of SWPs to society. In the natural science realm, biogeochemists, ecologists, and phycologists will quantify spatial and temporal aspects of SWP biogeochemistry and microbial community dynamics. The natural and social science realms will be linked through local and statewide socioecological surveys of SWPs and their communities, experiments testing efficacies of different algal management approaches, and synthetic analyses using geospatial approaches to identify relationships between social demographics and SWP ecosystem services. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.