Question

How are the spatial patterns of individuals’ perception of natural resource governance related to the spatial patterns of environmental restoration sites via distance and abundance of improved sites?

Datasets

 Puget Sound Partnership Social Data

My data came from a survey on subjective human wellbeing related to natural environments. The sample was a stratified random sample (28% response, n= 2323) of the general public from the Puget Sound in Washington from one time period. I am specifically examining questions related to perceptions of natural resource governance. Around 1730 individuals gave location data (cross street and zip code) which have been converted to GPS points. I also have demographic information for individuals, their overall life satisfaction, and how attached and connected they feel to the environment.

Environmental Data

I have three different forms of environmental data. (1) Point locations of restoration sites in the Puget Sound. (2) A shapefile of census tract level average environmental effects (the environmental condition ranked from 1 good to 10 very poor, and (3) Land cover raster files from 1992 and 2016.

• Individual restoration sites numbered over 12,000. They spanned many years, and point locations overlapped significantly through time.
• The environmental effects data comes from an online mapping tool that was created in a collaboration between the University of Washington, the Washington Department of Ecology, and the Washington Department of Health. Environmental effects are based on lead risk from housing, proximity to hazardous waste treatment storage and disposal facilities (TSDSs), proximity to national priorities list facilities (Superfund Sites). Proximity to Risk Management Plan (RMP) facilities, and wastewater discharge. The combination of these effects was aggregated within census tracks to produce an environmental effects ‘Rank’ from low effects (Rank of 1) to high effects (Rank of 10).
• The land cover files contained 25 different types of land cover. I reclassified these land cover types by combining similar types of land cover (e.g. deciduous forest and conifer forest to ‘forest’).

 

Hypotheses

 1) Shorter distances between individuals and restoration sites, and greater number of restoration sites near individuals, would correlate positively with governance perceptions

2) Positive environmental conditions will correlate positively with governance perceptions

Richard Petty and John Cacioppo developed the elaboration likelihood model (1980) which asserts how individuals change their attitude based on persuasive stimuli. Perry and Cacioppo develop this idea by implementing the idea of two routes of persuasion—the central and peripheral paths—where determinants of routes are determined by motivation, ability, and nature of mental processing. The purpose of this theory is to help explain how individuals elaborate on ideas to form attitudes and how strong, or long lasting, those attitudes are. This theory may suggest that individuals will form stronger attitudes when reasons to form attitudes are stronger and more immediate. Stimuli of this kind tend to be nearer to individuals, as processing of issues far away is cognitively difficult. Research has shown that individuals have a difficult time thinking about problems on larger spatial scales, and there is an inverse relationship between how feelings of individual responsibility for environmental problems and spatial scale (as scale gets larger, feelings of responsibility go down (Uzzell, 2000).

Cognitive biases also suggest that people use heuristics to answer questions when they are unsure. One common heuristic is the saliency bias, where individuals overemphasize things that are emotionally more important, and ignore less interesting things (Kahneman, 2011). This may suggest that spatial patterns are more important than temporal patterns because what is happening now is more salient to individuals than what happening in the past. This may imply that even if environmental outcomes have improved over time, the immediacy of the current environment or things influencing the environment may have a greater effect on individual perceptions.

 

Approaches

Statistical Analyses

Spatial Autocorrelation Analyses

Moran’s I: To compute Moran’s I, I used the “ape” library in R. I also subset my data to examine spatial autocorrelation by demographics including area (urban, suburban, rural), political ideology, life satisfaction, income, and cluster (created by running a cluster analysis on the seven variables which comprise the governance index

Correlograms: I created correlograms for the variables that were significant (urban, conservative, and liberal) using the “ncf” library and the correlog() function. These figures give a better picture of spatial autocorrelation at various distances.

Semivariograms: To create semivariograms, I used the “gstat” and “lattice” libraries which contain a function called variogram. This function takes the variable of interest along with latitude and longitude locations. The object created can then be plotted. For this analysis I used the same subsets as in the Moran’s I analysis. These figures are excluded from the results as they do not provide information beyond what the correlograms show.

Nearest Neighbor analysis: A file of restoration sites was loaded into R. The sites were points. This analysis required four libraries as the points were from different files. The libraries were: nlem, rpart, spatstat, and sf. I first had to turn my points into point objects in R (.ppp objects). I used the convenxhull.xy() function to create the ‘window’ for my point object, then I used that to run the ppp() function. I then used the nncross() function. This function produced min, max, average, and quartile distances from individuals to the nearest restoration site. I added the ‘distance’ from the nearest neighbor as a variable in a linear regression to determine an association. I used these distances (1^st quartile, median, and 3^rd quartile) to produce buffers. I ran spatial joins between the buffers and the restoration sites. This produced an attribute table that had a join count—the number of restoration sites within the buffer. In R I ran a linear regression with join count as an independent variable.

Geographically weighted regression: I joined individual points to my rank data, a shapfile at census tract level. This gave individuals a rank for environmental effects at their location. Initially I used the GWR tool in Arc to run the regression, but wanted the flexibility of changing parameters and an easily readable output that R provides. In R, I used two different functions to run GWR, gwr(), and gwr.basic(). The gwr() required creating a band using gwr.sel, and the gwr.basic required creating a band using bw.gwr. The difference between these functions is that gwr.basic produces p-values for the betas. I ran gwr on both my entire data set and a subset based on perceptions. The subset was the ‘most agreeable’ and ‘least agreeable’ individuals who I defined as those one standard deviation above and below the mean perception.

Neighborhood analysis: I created a dataset of the upper and lower values of my governance perceptions (one standard deviation above and below the means). I then added buffers to these points at 1 and 5 miles. I joined the buffers to the rank values to get an average rank within those buffers. I exported the files for each buffer to R. I created a density plot of average rank for the low governance values at each buffer, and for the high governance values at each buffer.

T-test: To test whether land cover change differed between those with high and low perceptions, I exported the tables and calculated the change in land cover for the two samples. I then ran two-sample t-tests for each land cover type change between the two groups.

Mapping

Kriging and IDW: I used the Spatial Analysis toolbox to preform Kriging and IDW to compare the outputs of the two techniques. I used my indexed variable of governance perceptions. The values of the variable vary from 1 to 7. I then also uploaded a shapefile bounding the sample area.

Hotspot Analysis: I used the Spatial Analysis toolbox to preform ‘hotspot analysis.’ I used my indexed variable of governance perceptions with values from 1 to 7.

Tabulate area: I used two land cover maps from 1992 and 2016 to approximate environmental condition. I loaded the raster layers into ArcGIS Pro, and reclassified the land types (of which there were 255, but only 25 present in the region) down to 14. I then created buffers of 5km for my points of individuals with governance scores one standard deviation above and below the average. I then tabulated the land cover area within the buffers for each time period.

 

Results

What are the spatial patterns of perceptions of natural resource governance?

 Moran’s I statistic for overall governance perceptions was insignificant, indicating a lack of spatial autocorrelation at the regional scale (I value; p = 0.51). Significant autocorrelation was detected when the data were subset by demographic variables. Individuals residing in urban areas exhibited spatial autocorrelation of perceptions while individuals in suburban and rural areas did not. Lastly, individuals classified as ‘conservative’ (political ideology < 0.5) exhibited significant spatial autocorrelation for governance perceptions (I statistic: -0.0062, p = 0.0018). The spatial autocorrelation for governance perceptions was mainly restricted to short distances as shown in the correlograms below. Significant correlations for the entire study population and individuals in urban areas were detected at near distances Individuals classified as conservative exhibited significant correlation across multiple distances. No significant correlations were found among liberal individuals, suggesting a non-spatial driver mechanism may be at play.

 

Local patches of significantly lower perceptions (cold spots) and significantly higher perceptions (hot spots) were identified as shown in the map below. Three ‘cold spots’ were located in the areas around Port Angeles, Shelton, and the greater Everett area. Two hot spots were identified surrounding Bainbridge Island, and the city of Tacoma, which is where the Puget Sound Partnership is located.

Blue points are “cold spots” at 99%, 95%, and 90% confidence that the points reside in a cold spot. Cold spots are areas where perception is significantly lower than the average compared to those around them. Red points are “hot spots” at 99%, 95%, and 90% confidence that the points resides in a hot spot. Hot spots are areas where perception is significantly higher than the average compared to those around them. Small grey points are insignificantly different. Bounding lines are counties in Northwest Washington.

What are the spatial patterns of natural resource governance perceptions in relation to environmental condition?

The median distance for individuals from restoration site was 0.037 degrees, 1^st quartile was 0.020 degrees, and 3^rd quartile was 0.057 degrees.

The regression on whether distance correlates with individual perception was insignificant (p = 0.198), which means distance from the nearest restoration site does not influence perceptions. For each regression on the number of sites near an individual, all coefficients were negative, meaning the more sites near an individual, the more disagreeable their perception was. All produced significant results, but the effect size of number of sites near individuals was very minimal (Table 1).

Table 1. Regression results for ‘nearest neighbor’ of individuals to restoration sites.

Buffer Size	b	p-value	Effect Size (rpb)
Buffer 1 (1st quartile)	-0.003	0.0181	.003
Buffer 2 (median)	-0.002	0.045	.002
Buffer 3 (3rd quartile)	-0.001	0.002	.003

In a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, rank, life satisfaction, years lived in the Puget Sound, and race are significant (Table 2). All other variables were insignificant. For rank (the combination score of environmental effects) the coefficient was positive. Higher rank values are worse environmental effects, so as agreeable perceptions increase, environmental condition decreases. Overall, the effect size of this model on governance perceptions was small, explaining about 10% of the variance in the data (Table 2).

A map of residuals from the GWR confirms the results from the hotspot analysis about where high and low responses congregate.

Table 2. Regression results for environmental effects at individuals’ locations.

Variable1	b	p-value2
Rank	0.077	0.007**
Life Satisfaction	0.478	<0.001**
Years Lived in the Puget Sound	-0.010	0.002**
Sex	-0.156	0.289
Area	-0.150	0.179
Education	-0.002	0.922
Income	-0.022	0.622
Race	0.006	0.034*
Ideology	0.103	0.533

¹R² = 0.094

² ** = significant at the 0.01 level, * = significant at the 0.05 level

The plot of high and low governance values at the two buffers is presented below. The black and grey curves represent respondents from the survey that were at least one standard deviation lower than the mean (the mean was neutral). The green curves represent respondents from the survey that were at least one standard deviation higher than the mean. The solid curves are the average rank at the one mile buffer, and the dotted curve is the average rank at the five mile buffer.

This figure indicates there are two peaks in average rank, at low environmental effects (~1) and at mid-environmental effects (~4.75). Those with lower perceptions of environmental governance had higher peaks at low environmental effects for each buffer size. Those with higher perceptions of environmental governance had a bimodal distribution with peaks at low and mid-environmental effects.

 

What are the spatial patterns of natural resource governance perceptions in relation to environmental condition over time?

I used land cover change as a proxy for environmental condition over time. Land cover change differed significantly for four different land cover types between the two groups—grassland, forest, shrub/scrub, and bare land cover. Grassland cover decreased for both groups, but decreased by 5% more in the areas with individuals with below average governance perceptions. Forest cover also decreased for both group, but decrease by 1% more individuals with below average governance perceptions (the amount of forest cover in the region is very large which accounts for why a 1% difference is significant). Shrub and scrub cover increased for both groups, but increased by 3% more in areas with individuals with below average governance perceptions. Lastly, bare land decreased for both, but decreased by 5% more for individuals in areas with individuals with below average governance perceptions (Table 3). The effect size of land cover change on perception was small for each of the significant variables with biserial correlations between .07 and .09 (Table 1).

Table 3. Differences in land cover change between individuals with above average perceptions of natural resource governance perceptions and individuals with below average governance perceptions

	Governance Perception1
	Above Average	Below Average	t-value	p-value	Effect size (rpb)
High Development	17	16	0.80	.426	.02
Medium Development	19	19	0.67	.500	.02
Low Development	11	11	0.22	.829	.00
Developed Open Space	12	13	0.21	.837	.00
Agriculture	-1	0	0.74	.461	.02
Grassland	-13	-18	3.03	.002	.09
Forest	-10	-9	2.61	.009	.08
Shrub/Scrub	40	43	3.04	.002	.09
Wetlands	0	0	1.67	.095	.05
Unconsolidated Shore	2	2	0.10	.918	.00
Bare Land	-21	-25	2.43	.015	.07
Water	0	0	0.90	.368	.03
Aquatic Beds	-1	-5	1.19	.233	.03
Snow/Tundra	0	0	0.00	.997	.00

¹Cell entries are percent changes of land cover from 1992 to 2016

As one land cover type goes up, another land cover type must go down. While forest overall decreased in the region for both groups over time, areas with lower perceptions saw significantly less decrease. The percentage is small, but a lot of the area in the region is forested, so the actual amount of land is large. The two maps below show land cover in 2016 (top) and 1992 (bottom) around the area of Port Angeles. This area is one that had a significant cold spot (low perceptions). From these maps, you can see a spread of the dark green color (forest), and a decrease of the yellow (grassland). Port Angeles historically was a timber community (the same could be said for the regions of the other cold spots in the region. This change in forest and grassland could be the source of negative perceptions if these communities believe the governance structures are responsible for the change in forest cover.

Significance

Overall, in this analysis, poor environmental condition relates to positive perceptions, and land cover change may provide insight into reasons for poor perceptions. Areas with negative perceptions may not directly indicate poor natural resource governance. Elsewhere, trust in natural resource governance was primarily driven by individual value orientations (Manfredo et. al. (2017). The three areas identified as cold spots in this study could be areas where individuals do not feel their values are represented by the natural resource governing systems. Conversely, hot spot area A is located near the headquarters of the Puget Sound Partnership, potentially facilitating trust, representation, and access to information that may influence the perceptions of individuals located nearby. This urban, liberal, developed area contrasts the area to the west with a highly significant cold spot (Area 2). Individuals from area two, a more rural, conservative, historic logging site likely have different value orientations than those from Area A. Similar comparisons of the other cold spots could be made to areas near them. More research should be conducted in this area to determine if value orientations have a significant influence on perceptions of natural resource governance.

 

Your learning

 

During this course I significantly advanced my knowledge in ArcGIS Pro and in R studio. I learned how to run many new tools in Arc including hotspot, geographically weighted regression, and tabulate area. I also learned new skills in troubleshooting problems. For example, I was having difficulty getting the rank data to display on my map. Another student taught me that as I imported the data from a .csv and joined it to a shapefile, I would need to create a new feature class from it before it would be able to display. I also gained knowledge in how to run more spatial analyses in R. These included many spatial autocorrelation analyses, and geographically weighted regression (which involved creating a point object!).

 

What did you learn about statistics?

 

I first and foremost learned of the existence of many types of spatial statistics. These included statistics Hotspot (Getis-Ord Gi*), spatial autocorrelation (correlogram, semivariogram, Moran’s I), geographically weighted regression (GWR). For hotspot, I learned what the hotspot clusters mean, and the best ways to pick the fixed-distance band of the neighbors the tool looks at (either through selecting the number of minimal points near it, or by looking at the z-score at the distance that shows the highest amount of spatial autocorrelation). Speaking of spatial autocorrelation, I learned what that meant in terms of the correlation of perceptions of governance between individuals depending on their distance from each other. Finally, I learned a little about GWR, including that it is necessary to plot the output to examine patterns over the space in question, and I also learned that the reason Arc does not display p-values for independent variables is not something to due with the equation, but actually due to computing power of Arc.