It is well known and discussed that the world’s regions are urbanizing and that populations centers are projected to continue increasing their human population densities. The state of Texas, specifically along the I-35 corridor is experiencing some of the most intense population growth in the United States (Census, 2014). This major corridor follows a prominent geographic boundary that also has significant precipitation, available water and environmental habitat implications. For this reason, many of the population centers are located adjacent to springs and river systems found here (Estaville and Earl, 2008).
Ecosystem services provides a framework for exploring in detail the relationships between humans and their environments. The growing body of work examining the sociocultural demand of ecosystem services (Castro et al., 2016 Martin-Lopez et al., 2014) offers insight into stakeholder understandings in these social-ecological systems. College universities constitute significant stakeholder groups in Town – Gown relationships (Mosier, 2015) and offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the sustainability influence on the cities they are part of. We conducted a questionnaire survey utilizing the ecosystem services framework and were able to compare use, value, and perceptions of the San Marcos River ecosystem services between student, resident, and tourist populations in San Marcos, Texas.
Results/Conclusions
Our results contribute to the development of stakeholder analysis methodologies and provide examples of how to survey representative population use, value and perceptions of ecosystem services at the municipal scale. Our findings show statistically significant results in the analysis of 3,126 responses due to multiple variables within the 95% range. We analyzed two main groups of variables consisting of individual demographics and individual life experiences. While many significant findings were revealed it was the variable of experiential education that played a determinant role in the responses. The finding of experiential education having the most significant impact on ecosystem service value and perception is useful when designing education programing. This study also shows that it is possible to survey large portions of municipal populations through mixed methods of email, mail, and in-person surveys. These findings contributed to a larger project that combines the results of survey responses, mapped ecosystem services areas, existing municipal growth, and future growth scenarios to explore the supply and demand of the San Marcos River in a rapidly growing city. We hope that other cities of similar situation and scale can benefit from our findings.