Management Effectiveness of a Secondary Coniferous Forest for Landscape Appreciation and Psychological Restoration.

Norimasa Takayama,Haruo Saito,Masahiro Horiuchi,Akio Fujiwara

doi:10.3390/ijerph14070800

Abstract

We investigated the influence of forest management on landscape appreciation and psychological restoration in on-site settings by exposing respondents to an unmanaged, dense coniferous (crowding) forest and a managed (thinned) coniferous forest; we set the two experimental settings in the forests of the Fuji Iyashinomoroi Woodland Study Center. The respondents were individually exposed to both settings while sitting for 15 min and were required to answer three questionnaires to analyze the psychological restorative effects before and after the experiment (feeling (the Profile of Mood States), affect (the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule), and subjective restorativeness (the Restorative Outcome Scale). To compare landscape appreciation, they were required to answer another two questionnaires only after the experiment, for scene appreciation (the semantic differential scale) and for the restorative properties of each environment (the Perceived Restorativeness Scale). Finally, we obtained these findings: (1) the respondents evaluated each forest environment highly differently and evaluated the thinned forest setting more positively; (2) the respondents’ impressions of the two physical environments did not appear to be accurately reflected in their evaluations; (3) forest environments have potential restorative effects whether or not they are managed, but these effects can be partially enhanced by managing the forests.

Highlights

33 years have elapsed since the restorative effects of nature proposed by Ulrich [1]became a subject of scientific analysis, and since the issue has been studied from psychological perspectives compared with urban settings [2,3,4,5,6]
We compared the illuminance and the sound pressure, and the results showed that the illuminance in the thinned forest was nearly twice as great (p < 0.01) and the sound pressure was slightly higher (p < 0.01) than in the crowding forest
Considering the results of this research, the user impressions and restorative traits of forest environments show the differences caused by forest management; we can think of management plans based on our finding that psychological restorative effects will not differ greatly

Summary

Introduction

33 years have elapsed since the restorative effects of nature proposed by Ulrich [1]became a subject of scientific analysis, and since the issue has been studied from psychological perspectives compared with urban settings [2,3,4,5,6]. 33 years have elapsed since the restorative effects of nature proposed by Ulrich [1]. According to Haluza et al [7], since the beginning of this century, the physiological and psychological restorative effects of forests have been investigated, primarily in developed countries where aging populations and declining birth rates have become serious issues. In Japan, since the concept of Shinrin-yoku (taking in a forest atmosphere or forest bathing) was proposed in 1982 [5], primarily in the second half of the 1990s, studies on the physiological and psychological restorative effects of forests progressed rapidly. Findings suggest that if citizens’ physical and mental health can be maintained by utilizing nature, including forests, medical expenses, and other costs could decrease, which would greatly benefit societies. Public Health 2017, 14, 800; doi:10.3390/ijerph14070800 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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