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ABSTRACT
Urban lakes and ponds (L&Ps) provide numerous ecological and social services for local populations living in urban areas. Their monitoring and management are mostly based on water quality and ecological indicators and poorly consider public preferences and expectancies related to these artificial ecosystems. Even fewer studies bring together expert indicators and public expectations to inform management objectives for urban lakes. Based on an interdisciplinary study, this paper compares an expert assessment of the ecological quality of three urban L&Ps located in the Ile-de-France area with the public perception of these lakes. This approach permits us to explore the compatibilities and incongruences between the various ways in which scientists, managers and urban users assess urban L&P quality. Based on these data, we discuss how it could be possible to define management objectives that integrate quality indicators and expect these objectives to be used in a territorial approach that might allow to obtain a better adequacy between social users’ expectations and the ecological status of these L&Ps.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the French National Research Agency under Grant ANR-10-CEPL-0010. We thank all the project members and partners who contributed to the data collection and analysis: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Sorbonne université, University of Limoges, University Paris-Sud, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, Ecole des Ponts Paris’Tech.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Veronica Mitroi
Veronica Mitroi is a researcher in environmental sociology at CIRAD - Center for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development. Her research work is focused on the study of various ways of knowing (expert and local) about the interactions between human societies and aquatic ecosystems, and on the mobilization of these knowledges in the management of water and aquatic ecosystems.
Veronique Maleval
Veronique Maleval is a geographer at the University of Limoges (France) and GEOLAB UMR 6042 CNRS. She is specialized in limnology, including both physical aspects (erosion, sedimentation, water quality in particular) and human (activities and practices of the various actors of watersheds). Her research fieldworks are situated in France, Morocco, Spain, Estonia.
José-Frédéric Deroubaix
José-Frédéric Deroubaix is Deputy Director and researcher in sociology at the Laboratoire Eau, Environnement et Systèmes Urbains (LEESU). His research is devoted to water management policies and the social appropriation of innovations in this field. In recent years, his research has been focused on the development of new policy models for the protection of water resources, flood risk prevention and management as well as the development and restoration of aquatic environments.
Brigitte Vinçon-Leite
Dr. Brigitte Vinçon-leite is a researcher in urban hydrology at LEESU (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech). Her research deals with the physical and ecological functioning of urban waterbodies through high-frequency measurements and numerical modelling approaches. Her research is aimed at achieving operational outcomes by combining these two approaches.
Jean-François Humbert
Jean-François Humbert is INRAe Senior Researcher, working at iEES Paris on the ecology of continental aquatic ecosystems, with a focus on microbial communities. His main research interests lies in the analysis of the causes and consequences of cyanobacterial proliferations on the functioning and the uses of freshwater ecosystems. He coordinated numerous research programs on these topics in France and in Subsaharian Africa.