UW-Madison/US EPA Region 5 Lake Monona Project

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Reducing Pesticide Use and Risk in Urban Landscapes

Funded by the US EPA Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program, September 2003-September 2005

Project Personnel:

Mrill Ingram, Farm and Home Environmental Management Programs, Environmental Resources Center, UW-Madison. Contact:mingram@wisc.edu

John Stier, Department of Horticulture, UW-Madison. Contact:jstier@wisc.edu

Richard Brooks, Department of Professional Development and Applied Studies, UW-Madison.

Visit the project website: http://www.askaboutipm.info.

Madison isthmus. Lake Monona in foreground, Lake Mendota in background.

Photo courtesy of Karl Hakanson.

Project Description

Nestled between two glacial lakes, Madison, Wisconsin is blessed with water resources. As in many urban watersheds, however, Madison has growing water pollution issues. One important pollution source is urban landscaping, in particular runoff from over-fertilization and pesticide misuse in lawns and gardens. Supported by the US EPA Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program this project employed a social marketing approach to understanding and redesigning educational outreach strategies that promote pollution prevention behaviors among urban landscapers. Our goal was to identify the barriers and benefits to the use of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) perceived by paid landscape managers in the Lake Monona watershed in the City of Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin. We used this information in our partnerships with other watershed education and pollution prevention groups and with public agencies to design effective outreach approaches.

According to the USGS urban watersheds may be more contaminated with pesticides than agricultural watersheds.

"Social marketing" goes beyond a one-way strategy of just informing people about issues. Social marketing begins with seeking to understand why people behave as they do and to identify what might support more sustainable behavior. A community based social marketing effort begins with setting clear objectives for a campaign and specifying a target audience. It includes building a relationship with the target audience and using surveys and focus groups in order to understand the behavior of that group, including existing levels of awareness of a problem, and barriers to action. Once this groundwork is laid, social marketing efforts try to "open the door" for people to pursue more environmentally friendly behaviors such as composting, recycling and natural lawn care.

Project Methods:

Telephone surveys of Lake Monona area landscapers to learn more about what land managers know about IPM, what their sources of information are, and how they perceive benefits and barriers to the use of IPM.
Building relationships with landscaper organizations as well as watershed partners to inform them of our project and involve them in setting goals.
Collecting existing IPM materials and messages available to professional landscapers and urban residents, and evaluating them in light of survey results.
Developing a social marketing strategy with principles and recommendations useful to urban watershed protectors nation-wide. It will include communications plans to use existing, revised or new landscaping IPM educational materials (such as a "Landscape-A-Syst" one-stop guide for landscape managers and a "green Landscaper" certification program in Wisconsin) and a social strategy for instituting new behavioral norms of urban landscape management.
We plan to initiate a pilot implementation to test the strategy in collaboration with grassroots organizations, watershed educators, and public agency partners in the Lake Monona watershed, and will also widely publish and share the social marketing analysis and strategies with water pollution prevention educators.