An insightful metric for evaluating perceived benefits from water quality enhancement in waterscape parks: A behavioral analysis approach

Abstract

The rational evaluation of pollution control measures is crucial for advancing water pollution management, ensuring water quality, and creating high-standard urban environments. Currently the evaluation heavily relies on water quality indicators with little regard to the sense of gain of the people. In this paper, we proposed an objective indicator PVH (Park Visiting Hours) to represent the behavioral response, as a materialized sense of humans, to water quality. We demonstrated the application of PVH in four typical waterscape parks in Beijing with multi-source data, and the results showed that: (1) The Mann-Kendall Test and an independent correlation test utilizing Sina Weibo data (Chinese Twitter) indicated that PVH was significantly negatively correlated with the Satellite image based Sensory Pollution Index (SPI), as corroborated the competence of PVH to appraise the sense of gain from water quality improvement. (2) Multivariate regressions showed that an increase in SPI of 0.1 corresponds to an average 8.8 min reduction in PVH. (3) The relationship between PVH and SPI was consistent across various visitor demographics, and whether visitors were in groups or alone. This study introduced PVH as a novel but concise indicator to represent water quality-related behavior of park visitors and would inspire the use of big multisource data for measuring human perceptions of ecosystem services.