TY - JOUR
T1 - Connections–between daily greenness exposure and health outcomes
AU - Jiang, Xiangrong
AU - Larsen, Linda
AU - Sullivan, William
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by [McHenry, K., Dietze, M., Kumar, P., Lee, J.S., & Minsker, B.S. (2013). Data infrastructure building blocks. National Science Foundation] grant number [569 NSF ACI 12-61582 WS]. William Sullivan is Senior Investigator. Funding also came from Sullivan, W.C. (2016). Landscapes on the Brain. USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station. Acknowledgments: This paper and the research behind it would not have been possible without the exceptional support of my adviser, William Sullivan. His knowledge and exciting attention to new methods have been an inspiration and motivated me to improve my work. Linda Larsen, my colleague at UIUC, has looked over my manuscript and discussed strategies to improve this paper. My friend Xiaohan Zhang has helped me to developed codes in R. Bing Zhang, the computer scientist at NCSA of UIUC, contributed time and offered generous help when I need to use the Green Index calculator. Yizhen Ding and Ning Zhang, graduate students in the Department of Landscape Architecture at UIUC have worked very hard to process raw data of the online survey. The generosity and expertise of one and all have improved this study in various ways and saved me from many errors.
Funding Information:
Funding: This research was funded by [McHenry, K., Dietze, M., Kumar, P., Lee, J.S., & Minsker, B.S. (2013). Data infrastructure building blocks. National Science Foundation] grant number [569 NSF ACI 12-61582 WS]. William Sullivan is Senior Investigator. Funding also came from Sullivan, W.C. (2016). Landscapes on the Brain. USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2020/6/1
Y1 - 2020/6/1
N2 - A compelling body of research demonstrates that exposure to nature, especially trees, is beneficial to human health. We know little, however, about the extent to which understory vegetation that does not reach the height of trees, impacts human health. An additional gap in our knowledge concerns the extent to which daily variations in exposure to various forms of vegetation are related to human health outcomes. Many previous findings describing such connections were achieved in laboratory settings or through semi-controlled experiments, which do not reflect the dynamic variations of people’s daily exposure to nature. Thus, we conducted an online survey to address these questions. We used the National Land Cover Dataset 2011 and Google Street View images to estimate participants’ daily exposure to nature, and two standard questionnaires (General Health SF-12 and the Perceived Stress Scale) to assess health. Results show that greater exposure to trees in daily life is associated with better health outcomes. Specifically, higher neighborhood concentrations of tree canopy are related to better physical health, overall health and an increased capacity to control stress. In contrast, the results exploring the health associations of understory vegetation were inconsistent. In most cases, understory vegetation had a negative relationship with stress and mental health measures.
AB - A compelling body of research demonstrates that exposure to nature, especially trees, is beneficial to human health. We know little, however, about the extent to which understory vegetation that does not reach the height of trees, impacts human health. An additional gap in our knowledge concerns the extent to which daily variations in exposure to various forms of vegetation are related to human health outcomes. Many previous findings describing such connections were achieved in laboratory settings or through semi-controlled experiments, which do not reflect the dynamic variations of people’s daily exposure to nature. Thus, we conducted an online survey to address these questions. We used the National Land Cover Dataset 2011 and Google Street View images to estimate participants’ daily exposure to nature, and two standard questionnaires (General Health SF-12 and the Perceived Stress Scale) to assess health. Results show that greater exposure to trees in daily life is associated with better health outcomes. Specifically, higher neighborhood concentrations of tree canopy are related to better physical health, overall health and an increased capacity to control stress. In contrast, the results exploring the health associations of understory vegetation were inconsistent. In most cases, understory vegetation had a negative relationship with stress and mental health measures.
KW - Daily exposure to nature
KW - Street view images
KW - Tree canopy
KW - Understory vegetation
KW - Urban nature
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U2 - 10.3390/ijerph17113965
DO - 10.3390/ijerph17113965
M3 - Article
C2 - 32503258
AN - SCOPUS:85086051309
SN - 1661-7827
VL - 17
SP - 1
EP - 20
JO - International journal of environmental research and public health
JF - International journal of environmental research and public health
IS - 11
M1 - 3965
ER -