• Study reveals stream restoration trade-o

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Tuesday, April 26, 2022 22:30:44
    Study reveals stream restoration trade-offs: Higher environmental
    benefits to be had where homeowners are less willing to pay

    Date:
    April 26, 2022
    Source:
    University of Maryland
    Summary:
    Homeowners in Baltimore area neighborhoods where stream restoration
    would do the most for water quality are far less willing to pay for
    such projects, than those in other areas, according to a new study.



    FULL STORY ========================================================================== Although stream restoration filters pollutants out of local waterways and improves the health of the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore area neighborhoods
    where it would do the most for water quality are far less willing to pay
    for such projects, according to a new study by a University of Maryland environmental economist and an interdisciplinary team of colleagues.


    ==========================================================================
    The team found that homeowners in the least densely populated, and
    generally wealthier areas of their study region, were less willing
    to pay to restore streams, while those in the most densely populated
    areas, which tended to have lower incomes, were more willing to pay for restoration projects.

    The study, which appeared in the journal Environmental Research Letters,
    should help inform decision makers charged with improving water quality,
    who often must balance community support with environmental impacts.

    "We see this strong urban-to-rural gradient where in urban areas there's
    a higher economic potential as far as community support to pay for stream restoration, but less ecological potential to reduce nutrient pollution,
    and vice versa," said David Newburn, an associate professor in the
    Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UMD and co-author
    of the study. "The overall trend is that there's often a trade-off for environmental and economic benefits from stream restoration projects, and
    it's hard to find the win-win locations." Stream restoration projects
    vary greatly with the local environment, but they are all designed to
    improve the ability of a stream to absorb and process nutrient pollutants
    and prevent them from flowing downstream. Such projects are central
    to improving water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and other watersheds
    around the world. But stream restoration can change the local landscape, sometimes removing trees or adding grassy meadows along streambanks.

    Newburn and his colleagues wanted to understand the complex relationship between the environmental benefits of stream restoration and the
    perceived value to homeowners who frequently pay for them through
    taxes and fees. The team combined their analysis of one of the most comprehensive data sets on urban stream water quality in the world with
    a homeowner survey to estimate willingness to pay for various types of restoration projects.



    ==========================================================================
    The researchers leveraged long-term sampling data from the Baltimore
    Ecosystem Study, which has been measuring streamflow and nutrient load
    (a measure of ecological health of a waterway) since 1998 across fully forested, agricultural and highly developed watersheds. Using modern
    ecosystem modeling techniques, they estimated how much of the nitrogen
    would be removed by different stream restoration designs in a variety
    of settings.

    They focused on small, headwater streams within the Baltimore region
    spanning urban, suburban and exurban neighborhoods, meaning neighborhoods outside of city septic systems that are dominated by single family
    homes on one to five acre lots. Newburn and his colleagues developed
    hydrologic models that showed stream restoration had the most nitrogen reduction in the less densely populated exurban areas, where small
    streams predominantly have low flows.

    Streams lined by grassy buffers had the highest nutrient reduction
    compared to tree-lined streams.

    The researchers suggest that low water flow in these areas allowed the
    streams to process nutrients in the water, and grassy buffers allowed more sunlight to reach the water than did tree covered stream banks. Sunlight
    is important because it helps the algae in streams to remove nitrogen
    from the water more effectively.

    The projects that had the least nitrogen pollution reduction were in
    the most densely populated, urban areas of Baltimore city. In these neighborhoods, urban runoff from impervious surfaces like rooftops and
    parking lots leads to local flooding during rainstorms, and the torrents
    of swift-moving water do not allow streams time to remove a substantial
    portion of the nutrient pollution.

    Next, the researchers used homeowner survey data to analyze willingness
    to pay for different stream restoration designs and mapped their results throughout the study region.



    ==========================================================================
    "In rural areas you get this high environmental benefit, that has high potential to remove nitrogen pollution from waterways, particularly when
    you remove trees and have grassy streambanks to open up the streams
    to sunlight," Newburn said. "But that's where you get the lowest
    willingness to pay and sometimes even resistance to tree removal from
    nearby homeowners compared to doing restoration somewhere else." Trees
    often represent an amenity that has value because homeowners enjoy their aesthetic benefits, and removing them equates to removing this value from
    the neighborhood. But in densely populated urban areas, where streams were
    more likely to be surrounded by human-made infrastructure, the addition of grassy meadows or trees during restoration provides green-space amenities
    that are often lacking, particularly in lower-income urban neighborhoods.

    Newburn noted that the added green space in urban areas has social
    benefits beyond water quality improvement that may be factored into
    the environmental and socio-economic analysis for decision makers. He
    also suggested that in the future, research on additional benefits of restoration projects such as reducing urban heat islands, restoring
    habitats, and quality of life benefits may reveal a greater balance that
    favors some projects more clearly than others.

    *Andrew Rosenberg earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural Resource Economics
    at UMD and is now a Research Agricultural Economist at the USDA.

    This research was supported by National Science Foundation Coastal
    Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability Program (Grant
    No. 1426819), and the National Science Foundation Long-Term Ecological
    Research (LTER) Program (Grant No. DEB-1027188) for the Baltimore
    Ecosystem Study, and the U.S.

    Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. This story does
    not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.


    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Maryland. Original
    written by Kimbra Cutlip. Note: Content may be edited for style and
    length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Ruoyu Zhang, David Newburn, Andrew Rosenberg, Laurence Lin, Peter
    Groffman, Jonathan Duncan, Lawrence Band. Spatial
    asynchrony in environmental and economic benefits of stream
    restoration. Environmental Research Letters, 2022; 17 (5): 054004
    DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac61c6 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220426101704.htm

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