**7. Conclusion**

This work expands on the research investigating the relationships between biophysical data and social data, specifically in the context of evaluating the relationships between sense of place and water quality. Davenport and Anderson [15] wrote "A holistic and integrated understanding is needed, though, of place meanings and the setting to which these meanings are ascribed. What happens to sense of place when places change? What happens when landscape change threatens place meanings and emotions? (p. 630)" Although a number of researchers have contributed to the sense of place literature since then, direct investigations of the impacts on sense of place from changes to the environment remain relatively non-existent.

We have presented a set of sense of place scales that capture the three main components of sense of place – place dependence, identity, and attachment. We combine these scales with qualitative questions in order to further understand the nuance of people's sense of place. Through our work, we are attempting to advance the research on sense of place, as well as contribute to better understanding social values for water quality. Used in conjunction with environmental economic valuation methods for recreation and water quality, sense of place may provide additional nuance and explanatory power in describing people's preferences for the quality of natural resources. We suggest that this approach may be useful in other places and contexts.

Sense of place is a promising metric in the assessment of water quality for capturing the social value of various locations. Moving forward, in order to identify the impacts of changes in water quality and better inform the process of managing resources, increased social and biophysical data are needed at place-based scales. If researchers collect and report these data in more consistent ways across places, it will be possible to make comparisons across places and contexts. Increased collection and application of place-based social data can contribute to understanding community priorities for conservation or restoration, which is crucial for informing targeted management aimed at water quality improvements. Identifying areas of particular value may also help to identify potential sources of conflict or areas of special value. By informing water quality management to better target waters, community priorities may be better accounted for in interventions and decisions. Finally, sense of place research can also be used to improve connections between humans and natural systems by understanding the social and environmental attributes that make a place important.

**31**

**Author details**

Kate K. Mulvaney\*, Nathaniel H. Merrill and Marisa J. Mazzotta

\*Address all correspondence to: mulvaney.kate@epa.gov

provided the original work is properly cited.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, Center for Environmental Measurement and Modeling, Atlantic Coastal Environmental Sciences Division, Narragansett, Rhode Island, USA

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand…*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91480*

*Sense of Place and Water Quality: Applying Sense of Place Metrics to Better Understand… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91480*
