Browsing by Author "Feldman, David"

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    From yards to cities: a simple and generalizable probabilistic framework for upscaling outdoor water conservation behavior
    Grant, Stanley B.; Duong, Kimberly; Rippy, Megan A.; Pierce, Gregory; Feldman, David; Zanetti, Enrique; McNulty, Amy (2020-05)
    Outdoor watering of lawns accounts for about half of single-family residential potable water demand in the arid southwest United States. Consequently, many water utilities in the region offer customers cash rebates to replace lawns with drought tolerant landscaping. Here we present a parcel-scale analysis of water savings achieved by a 'cash-for-grass' program offered to 60 000 homes in Southern California. The probability a resident will participate in the program, and the lawn area they replace with drought tolerant landscaping, both increase with a home's outdoor area. The participation probability is also higher if a home is occupied by its owner. From these results we derive and test a simple and generalizable probabilistic framework for upscaling water conservation behavior at the parcel-scale to overall water savings at the city- or water provider-scale, accounting for the probability distribution of parcel outdoor areas across a utility's service area, climate, cultural drivers of landscape choices, conservation behavior, equity concerns, and financial incentives.
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    Perceived services and disservices of natural treatment systems for urban stormwater: Insight from the next generation of designers
    Rippy, Megan A.; Pierce, Gregory; Feldman, David; Winfrey, Brandon; Mehring, Andrew S.; Holden, Patricia A.; Ambrose, Richard; Levin, Lisa A. (Wiley, 2022)
    1. Natural treatment systems (NTS) for stormwater have the potential to provide a myriad of ecosystem services to society. Realizing this potential requires active collaboration among engineers, ecologists and landscape planners and begins with a paradigm shift in communication whereby these groups are made aware of each other's perceptions about NTS and the presence of knowledge gaps that their respective disciplines can bridge. 2. Here we participate in the first part of what we hope will be a reciprocal exchange: presenting results from a landscape perceptions survey to urban planners, ecologists and landscape architects that illustrates how the next generation of engineers perceives NTS relative to other landscape features, and the implications of those perceptions for future infrastructure development. 3. Our results suggest that although lawns, gardens and native ecosystems were perceived as multifunctional, providing characteristic bundles of services/disservices, perceptions of NTS were more variable (i.e. there was no social norm for their perception). 4. Environmental worldviews, knowledge, attitudes about ecosystem services and demographics were all significant drivers of perceived services. However, students had difficulty identifying NTS correctly, and factual knowledge about NTS did not help students associate NTS with typical design services like flood reduction more than features not designed for those purposes, such as lawns. This suggests that engineering students lack familiarity with the outward appearance of NTS and have difficulty placing NTS services into a broader landscape context. 5. Expertise from urban planning and ecology could help bridge these knowledge gaps, improving the capacity of tomorrow's engineers to co-design NTS to meet diverse community needs.