Green stormwater infrastructure, including natural treatment systems (NTS), are an increasingly important part of stormwater management in cities. Although NTS have the potential to provide an array of ecosystem services and disservices to people, the extent to which they are perceived to be multifunctional remains unclear. Here we present results from a public-perceptions survey targeting engineering students (the next generation of NTS designers and perceivers), that evaluates perceived NTS multifunctionality, places it in context with other urban landscapes including lawns, gardens, and native landscape remnants, and assesses various drivers of perceived services and disservices across landscape types. Most landscapes were perceived as multifunctional, with lawns providing primarily cultural and regulating services, native landscapes promoting biodiversity and other organism-associated services/disservices, and gardens providing both. NTS were more variously perceived, suggesting there is no overarching social norm for their perception. Within-landscape variability in perceived services provisioning was observed for all landscape types. Significant drivers of this variability include individual knowledge, attitudes about ecosystem services, environmental worldviews, academic major, and demographics (country of origin, race, and gender). Attitudes about ecosystem services were the strongest driver of perception, with broader worldviews, knowledge, and demographics being important only variously. Although student knowledge about NTS was associated with higher perceived services provisioning, student capacity to differentiate NTS from other landscapes was not. This, in consort with low reported confidence in NTS identification, suggests that the capacity of surveyed students to identify NTS in situ was low. This constitutes a clear gap in their NTS knowledge base as well as a barrier to consistently linking NTS to the provisioning of specific services.

Perceived services and disservices of natural treatment systems for urban stormwater

2019 Fall National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.