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STAR Grantees Win Best Poster Prize
Friday, June 18, 2004
NCER Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (NCER) - Catherine Kling, Joseph Herriges, Kevin Egan, and John Downing, won the prize for best scientific poster at EPA’s 2004 Science Forum. Their poster, entitled “Valuing Water Quality in Midwestern Lake Ecosystems,” focuses on Iowans’ uses of, attitudes about, and value for water quality in Iowa lakes. Dr. Kling, Dr. Herriges, and Dr. Egan are all in the Economics Department at Iowa State University. Dr. Downing is a limnologist at Iowa State University.
Iowa’s policy makers are faced with the pressures of balancing federal water quality requirements, tight conservation budgets, and citizen concern for environmental preservation and restoration of Iowa’s resources. Since water quality improvements can be costly, Dr. Kling and her co-researchers are investigating how much benefit people obtain from these improvements. Dr. Kling and her team of researchers will gather four years of data, including willingness-to-pay, a measure of economic value. Economists and ecologists are working together to develop a database that includes water chemistry, biological analysis, and watershed data for 130 of Iowa’s principal recreation lakes.
The first year of the survey was funded by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. An EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grant provided the necessary funding to continue the survey for the full four years.
About 8,000 Iowans were selected for the surveys and there has been a 62 percent response rate to date. Initial results after one year of study show that, in 2002, about 62 percent of Iowans visited one of the 130 lakes listed in the research survey and they made about 8 trips per year to these lakes. Iowans also said that water quality was more important to them than proximity or local park facilities when they decided where to go. The most important issues to them were water clarity and safety from bacterial contamination.
For more information about Dr. Kling’s research with the STAR program, see: http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/6067/report/0.