Abstract
Addressing “wicked” problems like urban stormwater management necessitates building shared understanding among diverse stakeholders with the influence to enact solutions cooperatively. Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) are participatory modeling tools that enable diverse stakeholders to articulate the components of a socio-environmental system (SES) and describe their interactions. However, the spatial scale of an FCM is rarely explicitly considered, despite the influence of spatial scale on SES. We developed a technique to couple FCMs with spatially explicit survey data to connect stakeholder conceptualization of urban stormwater management at a regional scale with specific stormwater problems they identified. We used geospatial data and flooding simulation models to quantitatively evaluate stakeholders’ descriptions of location-specific problems. We found that stakeholders used a wide variety of language to describe variables in their FCMs and that government and academic stakeholders used significantly different suites of variables. We also found that regional FCM did not downscale well to concerns at finer spatial scales; variables and causal relationships important at location-specific scales were often different or missing from the regional FCM. This study demonstrates the spatial framing of stormwater problems influences the perceived range of possible problems, barriers, and solutions through spatial cognitive filtering of the system’s boundaries.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilIn polycentric urban regions, disparate stormwater management authorities segment physical and political boundaries, creating a challenging management environment
The accumulation curve of the number of unique components added per new Fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) shows that the number of new variables captured with each new map reached a threshold near 5 (Figure 5, right side)
Given the importance of scale for modeling problems and solutions with geospatial data, we examined the effect of spatial scale on FCMs and demonstrated how spatial scale impacts the variables and relationships described in FCMs addressing stormwater management in the Triangle region of North Carolina
Summary
Disparate stormwater management authorities segment physical and political boundaries, creating a challenging management environment. As rapid urban development and climate change advance, flooding and water quality degradation are forcing stormwater managers, policy-makers, and communities to approach these challenges together at new scales. In areas where water quality fails to comply with state or federal regulations, such as the US Clean Water Act, the cost of mitigation can be a significant burden on a city or town [1]. The costs of stormwater mitigation strategies can cause a public and political backlash against major improvements to the stormwater system at large, especially when coupled with ineffective management structures.
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