Public's perception of water quality and the use of water for recreation

The desire to improve the water quality of our rivers and streams is driven by the need to achieve river water quality objectives: to satisfy legislative requirements; and more recently to meet the aspirations of the general public in their use of rivers for water-based recreation. This includes direct contact, indirect contact and non-contact users of the river and river corridor. If management is to meet these varied requirements, it is essential that the water industry recognises the need for public resource management, within the framework of environmental management. This research investigates the key variables perceived by the public as indicators of polluted and clean water, and attempts to show the importance of these variables along with a number of other factors, such as attractiveness, which may influence the public's perception of water quality and the use of certain sites for recreation. The final aim of this research is to combine this information with a measure of actual water quality, the water quality index, to provide the maximum amount of information to the management of river water quality for a range of possible water uses. -from Authors