2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Competition for water resource in urban, suburban, rural, and agricultural areas will likely intensify in the coming decades as competition for potable water supplies increases. While water for irrigation meets a physical need for the plants, the water indirectly meets a psychological need by elevating homeowners’ perceived social status through aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Thus, homeowner perceptions about water use and conservation may be related to their perceptions about the importance of plants and landscapes. Education about and adoption of sustainable water use practices may help ensure an adequate supply of irrigation water while conserving water sources for human and ecosystem services. We hypothesized that water conservation involvement and expertise may be negatively related to the importance of landscaping since individuals with high aesthetic and recreational priorities use more water outdoors.

We conducted an online survey with 1,543 respondents in 2016 to ascertain their water conservation and plant expertise and involvement and horticultural importance. A principal component analysis was used to describe the strength and direction of correlated variables in terms of their potential to quantify unobservable constructs. The values that emerge show the interdependencies between observed variables which can be collapsed to a smaller set of components. In the analysis, we retained items with loadings ≥ 0.500. Five components emerged: Landscape Beautification, Active Landscape Enjoyment, Passive Landscape Enjoyment, Low Maintenance Landscape Desire, and Response in Drought. The components identified in those analyses are useful in segregating a sample into smaller clusters or market segments. We conducted a K-means cluster procedure using the five components that emerged. Cluster analysis results identified two key market segments comprising ~50% of the sample each: those who are Actively Interested in Water Conservation and those who are Passively Disinterested in Water Conservation. The Actively Interested segment scored higher on selected components relating to horticultural importance including aesthetically beautiful landscapes, active landscape enjoyment, desire for a low maintenance landscape, and response in drought compared to the Passively Disinterested segment. The latter segment scored higher on a component labeled inactive with no landscape enjoyment. Findings suggest that pro-water conserving attitudes are found among consumers who value outdoor landscapes and those individuals who spent more on plants. Results suggest that producers and retailers should focus marketing and communication efforts on low-water use cultivar selection and operationalizing water conserving behaviors more than convincing consumers that plant purchases and landscaping are important.