When it comes to technical terminology, policy makers might have a hard time telling the public about hypoxia.
When surveyed by the PIE Center, Floridians showed low concern about hypoxia, which is more commonly associated with terms like dead zones or red tides.
The scientific term for water with low levels of oxygen might not have been familiar to state residents, according to Tracy Irani, PIE Center director and faculty member in the UF/IFAS Department of Agricultural Education and Communication.
“I think hypoxia is a scientific term and, in general, people don’t pay attention to those scientific terms all the time,” she said. “We might be aware that the term is out there and has something to do with water, but only if it’s important to us personally will we go out and find out what that means.”
When a body of water enters a state of hypoxia, it is susceptible to a wide variety of environmental issues, including dead zones that cause massive fish die-offs and algae blooms known as red tide.
The survey asked participants a wide variety of questions on topics ranging from water usage to conservation and quality. Part of the survey included questions about how important participants rank concerns about issues that affect water, including hypoxia and saltwater intrusion.
Shallow, semi-enclosed water bodies, such as the Gulf of Mexico, are particularly prone to environmental issues such as hypoxia. Between 6,000 and 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico is hypoxic, starting from the Mississippi River delta and reaching westward to the upper Texas coast.
Participants were asked to rate the importance of different water quality issues. Hypoxia was highly or extremely important to 37.7 percent of participants, and slightly or not at all important to 36.3 percent.
The PIE Center used technical terminology in its survey to mimic words that participants would see used by scientists being interviewed in the media or by policy makers on places like ballots, Irani said.
“Policies are written in technical language,” she said. “We wanted to get a sense of to what extent members of the public might be able to connect the technical term to what’s going on in a water body.”
Another possible reason Irani discussed for the low concern for hypoxia is that the condition affects people differently based on geographic area.
“We’ve done some research that looked at differences between the Atlantic coast and the gulf coast, and there is a significant difference in how people think about how the bodies of water that they’re next to,” she said. “Hypoxia is definitely more of a west coast issue, not as much of an east coast issue.”
The PIE Center expects to measure the public’s opinion on water annually and how it is changing over time.
“Everything about water is a priority,” Irani said. “So we want to try and address all of these issues.”
The water survey is part of a quarterly series of research that will measure public opinion on topics such as immigration and endangered species habitat loss.
