**1. Introduction**

Coastal and freshwater areas are important (or not) to people for a number of reasons ranging from the provision of the right resources for recreational activities to ease of accessibility for a family's use. Decisions about actions and policies that affect water quality can be better informed by understanding what makes people value various locations and how improvements or degradations in water quality can affect that value. While biophysical data are being increasingly collected, analyzed, and applied to critical environmental decisions, complementary social data remain relatively scarce. This presents a significant problem, as water quality impairments are inherently social problems in specific locations and effective solutions require public support and community willingness to make decisions and changes. Even the most readily available social data related to water quality—water quality perceptions and travel cost studies—are limited in scope and quantity and often do not consider the extent of environmental attributes of those places [1].

Sense of place has significant potential as an indicator of the social value of different locations and their environmental attributes. In this chapter, we focus on using sense of place to capture values related to water quality and connecting this sense of place value with biophysical water quality metrics and other social indicators. To date, sense of place assessments have focused on water quality have been conducted in only a few places and most do not link to specific biophysical metrics. We highlight the utility of sense of place as an indicator of the relative importance of different sites and its potential for assessing water quality in conjunction with other social and biophysical data. First, we review the literature on sense of place and its historical application and findings. We then describe the few existing applications of sense of place in the context of environmental attributes, including water quality. This chapter ends with a call for researchers to use sense of place as a cultural ecosystem service indicator and we present a proposed sense of place scale for use in water quality social assessments.
