The impetus for the research comes from a perceived lack of sustainable landscape surface treatments on The Ohio State University’s main campus, and the idea that such treatments are unacceptable to the public.
Understanding preferences and acceptability for surrounding landscapes and how acceptability shapes the environment are not only an academic challenge but is also critical for policy making and implementation. This investigation begins to address a gap in the landscape preference literature pertaining to landscape preferences in an academic campus setting. The research question is:
What are acceptable surface treatments on an academic campus?
The study looks at a range of three surface treatments: One unsustainable landscape surface treatment – manicured grass (control) – and two sustainable landscape surface treatments – unmanaged early successional (rough), and managed early successional (prairie) conditions. These surface treatments are tested in four settings typical on an academic campus: paths, forecourts, quads, and open spaces. The research hypothesis is:
Sustainable landscape surface treatments are acceptable in an academic campus.
This research made use of a modified Visual Preference Survey¿¿¿¿¿¿¿, which has been the predominant instrument in this type of research for twenty years (Nelessen and Constantine, 1993). A random sample of 2,000 students and 2,000 faculty and staff e-mails drawn from all campuses of The Ohio State University is surveyed with 248 respondents (6.2% response rate). One half of the subjects received a survey with information pertaining to the negative impacts of lawns. The other half did not receive this information, to test the effect of information on a subject’s perception of sustainable landscapes.
A set of sub-hypotheses was informed and generated from a literature review of relevant research. Previous studies indicate a strong causal relationship between cultural background (Kaplan R and Herbert, 1987; Ode et al., 2009), education level and type (Kaltenborn and Bjerke, 2001; McFarland, 2010) gender and age (Ewert and Baker, 2001) and environmental values (Dearden, 1984), and subject’s landscape preferences.
Study results support a strong causal relationship between level of education, cultural origin, and environmental values, where subjects attaining higher levels of education, from the United States, or with positive environmental values do find sustainable landscape surface treatments more acceptable than subjects not meeting these criteria.
The primary limitations of this study are the lack of geographic range (subjects are drawn primarily from The Ohio State University campuses, e.g. Midwest), short length of study (six months), and inability to test for familiarity.
This study adds to the research pertaining to landscape preference, and addresses an area not previously investigated. The outcomes establish parameters for future research and are disseminated through publication and presentations.