Understanding Public Engagement in Water Conservation Behaviors and Knowledge of Water Policy: Promising Hints for Extension

Sustaining water resources is a primary issue facing Florida Extension. The study reported here identified how experience with water issues and familiarity with water policies affected individuals\u27 engagement in water conservation behaviors. A public opinion survey was conducted online to capture Florida residents\u27 responses. The findings indicated experience with water issues and familiarity with water policies were predictors of individuals\u27 engagement in civic water conservation behaviors. Given this, Extension educators developing programs and educational materials about water conservation behaviors should cover information related to water policies because participants will be more inclined to engage if they are familiar with policies

Identifying Invasive Species Educational Needs in Florida: Opportunities for Extension

Florida\u27s ecology has been adversely affected by invasive species. In Florida, a study was conducted to explore opportunities for Extension educators to contribute to combating the issue of invasive species. Florida residents\u27 responses were captured through the use of an online public opinion survey. The findings revealed a need for invasive species education and respondent interest in learning about invasive species. Potential communication strategies Extension educators should use for invasive species programming also are discussed

Impact of Experience and Participation in Extension Programming on Perceptions of Water Quality Issues

Water is an essential resource for human activities and the global ecosystem. However, issues related to water quality have been reported internationally for quite some time with little to no action taken by the public to alter practices to ensure a future sustainable water supply. International extension educators have taken a role in educating about water quality but issues continue to exist. In order to understand current public perceptions of water quality issues and the influence of extension programming, an online survey was conducted in Florida, a part of the U.S. where water is readily accessible but water quality issues are pervasive, leading to a disconnect between what the public thinks about water and the realities of the water scarcity situation. Individuals’ experiences with water quality issues, participation in extension programs, perceptions on water quality, and the importance of clean water were collected and the relationships were examined. The findings indicated respondents who had experienced water quality issues perceived water quality was getting worse and that clean water was important. However, the respondents who had participated in extension programs perceived water quality was getting better, but their perceptions of the importance of clean water were inconsistent based upon their extension programming engagement. Recommendations provide insight into how international extension educators can enhance public awareness of water quality issues globally through programming designed to drive behavior changes that will result in enhanced water quality around the world

Enhancing Extension Program Effectiveness by Examining Regional Differences in High Water Users

Competition for water sources in urban areas of Florida has increased due to increased population and human activities. High water users have been identified as a specific group on which Extension should focus water conservation education due to their low awareness of water issues and active landscape water use. In order to ensure the effectiveness of Extension programs targeting high water users statewide, this study sought to explore regional differences in water conservation behavior engagement within Florida high water users. An online survey was conducted to capture responses of high water users (N = 932) in three distinct regions for this comparative study. Respondents were asked to indicate their current engagement in water use behavior, application of water conservation strategies, and likelihood of engaging in water conservation and related societal behaviors. Regional differences were found in all four examined constructs. The findings imply Extension educators should tailor educational programs to regional audiences’ behavior patterns instead of designing statewide programs to ensure program effectiveness

Public Opinions of Farmer-Oriented Environmentally Friendly Extension Programs: A Case of Best Management Practices

Public concern about environmental protection has been developing for decades. However, a knowledge gap exists between farmers and consumers regarding the implementation of environmental protection practices through the use of Best Management Practices (BMPs). Extension can bridge this knowledge gap by developing effective educational programs about BMP use. This study sought to identify consumers’ perceptions of BMPs and preferred communication channels to facilitate the development of farmer-oriented Extension programs which assist with direct communication between farmers and consumers. Residents in seven Florida counties (N = 700) were surveyed for this descriptive study. Respondents were asked about their perceptions, beliefs, trust, and attitudes related to BMPs, as well as preferred communication channels for farming practices. The findings indicated the respondents either agreed or were undecided if farmers practice BMPs properly, and the majority perceived farmers’ engagement in BMPs as important. Over 60% of the respondents believed farmers practicing BMPs care about the environment and would trust and purchase products from BMPpracticing farmers. The respondents indicated their preferred information sources were mass media and communicating directly with farmers at farmers’ markets and local festivals. Therefore, Extension educators should develop educational programs for farmers emphasizing the need to communicate with consumers using consumers

Exploring Nursery Growers’ Perceptions, Attitudes and Opinions about Water Usage to Inform Water Conservation Education

Research has shown the nursery industry needs to seek alternative water sources and adopt water conservation strategies to reduce water use in order to stay viable. This study used a qualitative approach to explore nursery growers’ perceptions, attitudes, and opinions about water usage to inform the development of Extension programs that encourage adoption of water conservation strategies. Interviews were conducted with 24 nursery growers across the U.S. The findings indicated growers interact with water in various ways, including meeting plant water needs, facilitating chemical distribution, controlling product quality, and facilitating business operations. The participants felt protecting water was the right thing to do and could provide economic benefits to their business, but water management was perceived as a task enforced by regulations. They reported their future interaction with water would include combatting water issues, engaging in the development and implementation of government regulations, seeking water conservation technologies and information, and dealing with financial challenges. Extension educators should be aware of these needs to alleviate concerns about integrating new processes into business plans. Educational programs should assist in the promotion of water conserving products based on knowledge gaps and provide assistance for easier adoption of new technologies by growers

Learning Graph-Convolutional Representations for Point Cloud Denoising

Point clouds are an increasingly relevant data type but they are often corrupted by noise. We propose a deep neural network based on graph-convolutional layers that can elegantly deal with the permutation-invariance problem encountered by learning-based point cloud processing methods. The network is fully-convolutional and can build complex hierarchies of features by dynamically constructing neighborhood graphs from similarity among the high-dimensional feature representations of the points. When coupled with a loss promoting proximity to the ideal surface, the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a variety of metrics. In particular, it is able to improve in terms of Chamfer measure and of quality of the surface normals that can be estimated from the denoised data. We also show that it is especially robust both at high noise levels and in presence of structured noise such as the one encountered in real LiDAR scans.Comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 202

PUGeo-Net: A Geometry-centric Network for 3D Point Cloud Upsampling

This paper addresses the problem of generating uniform dense point clouds to describe the underlying geometric structures from given sparse point clouds. Due to the irregular and unordered nature, point cloud densification as a generative task is challenging. To tackle the challenge, we propose a novel deep neural network based method, called PUGeo-Net, that learns a $3\times 3$ linear transformation matrix $\bf T$ for each input point. Matrix $\mathbf T$ approximates the augmented Jacobian matrix of a local parameterization and builds a one-to-one correspondence between the 2D parametric domain and the 3D tangent plane so that we can lift the adaptively distributed 2D samples (which are also learned from data) to 3D space. After that, we project the samples to the curved surface by computing a displacement along the normal of the tangent plane. PUGeo-Net is fundamentally different from the existing deep learning methods that are largely motivated by the image super-resolution techniques and generate new points in the abstract feature space. Thanks to its geometry-centric nature, PUGeo-Net works well for both CAD models with sharp features and scanned models with rich geometric details. Moreover, PUGeo-Net can compute the normal for the original and generated points, which is highly desired by the surface reconstruction algorithms. Computational results show that PUGeo-Net, the first neural network that can jointly generate vertex coordinates and normals, consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and efficiency for upsampling factor $4\sim 16$.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure