Rural water use decision-making, adoption of water conservation practices in southwestern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Almost all rural Ontarions use self-supplied water (e.g., private wells) for domestic, agricultural and other purposes. Shortages are increasingly common in Ontario, particularly during the drier summer months when water demand is at its highest. Water availability and related problems are expected to intensify with projected population growth and urban expansion, and with projected climate change. One approach to addressing water supply problems is the practice of water conservation. Promotion of water conservation initiatives is, however, dependent on identifying influences on certain water use decisions and subsequent behaviour. Factors associated with the adoption of conservation practices vary and include endogenous and exogenous influences, including, among others, attributes of the decision-maker, farm economic factors, and biophysical conditions. This research was an investigation into rural water conservation decision-making in southwestern Ontario. It aimed to identify and assess the importance of a range of factors influencing rural domestic and agricultural decision-making with regards to water conservation. Mail-back questionnaire responses from 291 agricultural and rural non-farm property owners revealed that most practice some form of water conservation, whether deliberately or incidentally. Analysis indicated that household water-saving was more common indoors than outdoors, and non-farm respondents were more active household conservers than agricultural respondents. Livestock operators favoured water equipment maintenance over all other livestock water-saving measures. Irrigators were more likely to adopt a series of conservation measures, most commonly scheduling of irrigation, and reducing water needs of agricultural crops. Statistical analysis revealed that adoption of water conservation measures in the home was influenced by program awareness and participation, level of formal education, and anticipation of future water shortages. Higher levels of livestock water conservation were associated with several factors, including greater farm gross sales, agriculture as the primary income source, and land tenure. Lengthy, in-depth interviews with seventeen agricultural households provided additional insight into the potential motivations and constraints for water conservation. Perceptions of limited opportunities to conserve water in the home and in agriculture were constraints to adoption. Furthermore, perceptions of water conservation, primarily conservation as a preventative measure to avoid water shortages, highlighted why experience with a water shortage did not influence water conservation behaviour. Technological fixes in response to past experiences may negate any motivation to implement preventative conservation. Awareness programs aimed at household water conservation may prove effective in rural households, although somewhat less effective in agriculture. Financial incentives to aid in the installation of water-saving equipment, along with awareness programs, may be necessary to improve water conservation within the agricultural sector.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".