Abstract
Promotion of mental well-being is a desired goal of service in sustainable urban forest management. Microclimate is impacted by forest settings which makes ecosystem services perceived by users. Changes of regional meteorological factors drive responses of emotional perceptions as spatial distribution pattern in accordance with regional urban forest landscapes. In this study, we collected a total of 1422 pairs of happy and sad scores for visitors in 30 urban parks around Shanxi province in North China, where local meteorological were obtained specially for each location as daily matched records. Happy expression scores increased along a latitudinal gradient from south to north. Microclimate did not have any relationship with emotional expressions, but factors of rainfall, wind velocity, average temperature, and relative humidity all had potential contributions to shape distributions of happy and sad scores. The relationship between meteorological records of wind velocity and average temperature and their potential contributions to happy scores can be described by quadratic polynomial functions. Overall, we recommend an environment of urban parks that can optimize emotional well-being with environments of wind velocity of 5.36 m s−1 and average temperature of 6.05 °C in cities around Shanxi in North China. Therefore, microclimates can shape the regional distributions of urban forest ecosystem services of promoting mental well-being, in a way as implicit drivers instead of explicit forces.
Highlights
Developed forests can be taken as a nature-based solution to cope with mental stressors and anxious emotions of frequent city visitors [1,2]
All four factors of rainfall, wind velocity, average temperature, and relative humidity (RH) all had potential contribution to impact both types of emotions
We recommended a condition that can optimize emotional well-being with environments of wind velocity of 5.36 m s−1 and average temperature of 6.05 ◦ C
Summary
Developed forests can be taken as a nature-based solution to cope with mental stressors and anxious emotions of frequent city visitors [1,2]. Urban dwellers are subjected to an environment with a high probability to suffer mental stressors in a wide range of demographical characteristics [3,4,5,6]. Contacting green space by experiencing enriched biodiversity and naturalness contributes to improvements of mental well-being [7]. Natural settings in green infrastructures have all been demonstrated to benefit mental health and well-being [8,9]. People have accumulated knowledge about the approach and process of urban forest experiences for promoting mental health. Our understanding is still limited about the mechanism to validate the promotion of mental well-being by an experience in urban forests
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