Characterizing the Social-Ecological System for Inland Freshwater Salinization using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: Implications for Collective Management

Current regulatory tools are not well suited to address freshwater salinization in urban areas and the conditions under which bottom-up management is likely to emerge remain unclear. We hypothesize that Ostrom’s social-ecological-systems (SES) framework can be used to explore how current understanding of salinization might foster or impede its collective management. Our study focuses on the Occoquan Reservoir, a critical urban water supply in Northern Virginia, U.S., and uses fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) to characterize stakeholder understanding of the SES that underpins salinization in the region. Hierarchical clustering of FCMs reveals four stakeholder groups with distinct views on the causes and consequences of salinization, and actions that could be taken to mitigate it, including technological, policy, and governance interventions and innovations. Similarities and differences across these four groups, and their degree of concordance with measured/modeled SES components, point to actions that could be taken to catalyze collective management of salinization in the region.