IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v17y2025i6p2556-d1612190.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From the Mountains to the Beach: Water Purification Ecosystem Services and Recreational Beach Use in Puerto Rico

Author

Listed:
  • Maya Corridore

    (Department of Biology, Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308, USA)

  • Rebeca de Jesús Crespo

    (Department of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA)

  • Mariam Valladares-Castellanos

    (Department of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA)

  • Thomas Douthat

    (Department of Environmental Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA)

Abstract

Recreational beach use is important for coastal economies and is influenced by water clarity, a trait that may be maintained by water purification ecosystem services (ESs). However, few studies have addressed these linkages. In this study, we ask the following questions: (1) Do watershed-scale water purification ecosystem services influence coastal water quality? (2) Does coastal water quality help explain beach visitation rates? To address these questions, we focused on Puerto Rico (PR), where coastal tourism has economic and cultural importance. We estimated water purification ESs using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), coastal water quality using long-term monitoring data, and beach visitation rates using the InVEST Recreation model. We used Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and regression analysis to evaluate these linkages accounting for influential anthropogenic factors (amenities, population density, and impervious surfaces). Water purification ESs strongly predicted coastal water quality, which, in turn, significantly explained beach water clarity. However, amenities and impervious surfaces best explained beach visitation. Our study suggests a disconnect between water quality and recreational beach use in PR, which should be explored further.

Suggested Citation

  • Maya Corridore & Rebeca de Jesús Crespo & Mariam Valladares-Castellanos & Thomas Douthat, 2025. "From the Mountains to the Beach: Water Purification Ecosystem Services and Recreational Beach Use in Puerto Rico," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(6), pages 1-13, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:6:p:2556-:d:1612190
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/6/2556/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/6/2556/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dengyue Zhao & Mingzhu Xiao & Chunbo Huang & Yuan Liang & Ziyue An, 2021. "Landscape Dynamics Improved Recreation Service of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(16), pages 1-16, August.
    2. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve, 2015. "Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i01).
    3. Peng, Marcus & Oleson, Kirsten L.L., 2017. "Beach Recreationalists' Willingness to Pay and Economic Implications of Coastal Water Quality Problems in Hawaii," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 41-52.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jingyi Wang & Jinghan Wang & Jia Jia & Guangyong Li, 2025. "Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Driving Factors of Ecological Environment in Metropolitan Area Under Urban Spatial Structural Transformation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 17(13), pages 1-22, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. JANSSENS, Jochen & DE CORTE, Annelies & SÖRENSEN, Kenneth, 2016. "Water distribution network design optimisation with respect to reliability," Working Papers 2016007, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    2. Teruaki Kido & Yuko Yotsumoto & Masamichi J. Hayashi, 2025. "Hierarchical representations of relative numerical magnitudes in the human frontoparietal cortex," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 16(1), pages 1-15, December.
    3. Raymond Hernandez & Elizabeth A. Pyatak & Cheryl L. P. Vigen & Haomiao Jin & Stefan Schneider & Donna Spruijt-Metz & Shawn C. Roll, 2021. "Understanding Worker Well-Being Relative to High-Workload and Recovery Activities across a Whole Day: Pilot Testing an Ecological Momentary Assessment Technique," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(19), pages 1-17, October.
    4. Elisabeth Beckmann & Lukas Olbrich & Joseph Sakshaug, 2024. "Multivariate assessment of interviewer-related errors in a cross-national economic survey (Lukas Olbrich, Elisabeth Beckmann, Joseph W. Sakshaug)," Working Papers 253, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    5. Otrachshenko, Vladimir & Tyurina, Elena & Nagapetyan, Artur, 2022. "The economic value of the Glass Beach: Contingent valuation and life satisfaction approaches," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    6. Valentina Krenz & Arjen Alink & Tobias Sommer & Benno Roozendaal & Lars Schwabe, 2023. "Time-dependent memory transformation in hippocampus and neocortex is semantic in nature," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-17, December.
    7. Morán-Ordóñez, Alejandra & Ameztegui, Aitor & De Cáceres, Miquel & de-Miguel, Sergio & Lefèvre, François & Brotons, Lluís & Coll, Lluís, 2020. "Future trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services in Mediterranean forests under global change scenarios," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 45(C).
    8. Han-Shen Chen & Chu-Wei Chen, 2019. "Economic Valuation of Green Island, Taiwan: A Choice Experiment Method," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-17, January.
    9. Damian M. Herz & Manuel Bange & Gabriel Gonzalez-Escamilla & Miriam Auer & Keyoumars Ashkan & Petra Fischer & Huiling Tan & Rafal Bogacz & Muthuraman Muthuraman & Sergiu Groppa & Peter Brown, 2022. "Dynamic control of decision and movement speed in the human basal ganglia," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, December.
    10. Dongyan Liu & Chongran Zhou & John K. Keesing & Oscar Serrano & Axel Werner & Yin Fang & Yingjun Chen & Pere Masque & Janine Kinloch & Aleksey Sadekov & Yan Du, 2022. "Wildfires enhance phytoplankton production in tropical oceans," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-9, December.
    11. Zhaogeng Yang & Yanhui Li & Peijin Hu & Jun Ma & Yi Song, 2020. "Prevalence of Anemia and its Associated Factors among Chinese 9-, 12-, and 14-Year-Old Children: Results from 2014 Chinese National Survey on Students Constitution and Health," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(5), pages 1-10, February.
    12. Marco Lopez-Cruz & Fernando M. Aguate & Jacob D. Washburn & Natalia Leon & Shawn M. Kaeppler & Dayane Cristina Lima & Ruijuan Tan & Addie Thompson & Laurence Willard Bretonne & Gustavo los Campos, 2023. "Leveraging data from the Genomes-to-Fields Initiative to investigate genotype-by-environment interactions in maize in North America," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-14, December.
    13. Baumann, Elias & Kern, Jana & Lessmann, Stefan, 2019. "Usage Continuance in Software-as-a-Service," IRTG 1792 Discussion Papers 2019-005, Humboldt University of Berlin, International Research Training Group 1792 "High Dimensional Nonstationary Time Series".
    14. repec:cup:judgdm:v:16:y:2021:i:1:p:201-237 is not listed on IDEAS
    15. C. Gabriel Hidalgo Pizango & Eurídice N. Honorio Coronado & Jhon del Águila-Pasquel & Gerardo Flores Llampazo & Johan de Jong & César J. Córdova Oroche & José M. Reyna Huaymacari & Steve J. Carver & D, 2022. "Sustainable palm fruit harvesting as a pathway to conserve Amazon peatland forests," Nature Sustainability, Nature, vol. 5(6), pages 479-487, June.
    16. Evans O. Mudibo & Jasper Bogaert & Caroline Tigoi & Moses M. Ngari & Benson O. Singa & Christina L. Lancioni & Abdoulaye Hama Diallo & Emmie Mbale & Ezekiel Mupere & John Mukisa & Johnstone Thitiri & , 2024. "Systemic biological mechanisms underpin poor post-discharge growth among severely wasted children with HIV," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-17, December.
    17. Lin-Lin Wang & Zachary Y. Huang & Wen-Fei Dai & Yong-Ping Yang & Yuan-Wen Duan, 2024. "Mixed effects of honey bees on pollination function in the Tibetan alpine grasslands," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-12, December.
    18. Szefer Elena & Lu Donghuan & Nathoo Farouk & Beg Mirza Faisal & Graham Jinko, 2017. "Multivariate association between single-nucleotide polymorphisms in Alzgene linkage regions and structural changes in the brain: discovery, refinement and validation," Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, De Gruyter, vol. 16(5-6), pages 367-386, December.
    19. Michele Ricci & Andrea Devecchi & Riccardo Migliavada & Maria Piochi & Luisa Torri, 2025. "Effect of Demographic Characteristics and Personality Traits on Eating Patterns in the Context of Dietary Intervention: The EATMED Case Study," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 22(7), pages 1-16, July.
    20. Julien Collet & Samantha C Patrick & Henri Weimerskirch, 2017. "A comparative analysis of the behavioral response to fishing boats in two albatross species," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 28(5), pages 1337-1347.
    21. Sean Coogan & Zhixian Sui & David Raubenheimer, 2018. "Gluttony and guilt: monthly trends in internet search query data are comparable with national-level energy intake and dieting behavior," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 4(1), pages 1-9, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:6:p:2556-:d:1612190. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.