Use Of Natural Environment Research Articles

Associations between access to green and blue spaces and physical activity attainment – an 18-country study

PDS 70: Green space, Johan Friso Foyer, Floor 1, August 28, 2019, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM Epidemiological and health geography research has found mixed support for the idea that better availability of natural environments is related to higher physical activity attainment. Often this is because the relationship is limited by the definitions of “physical activity” and “natural environment”, and direct use of natural environments is not considered. We examined associations between different metrics of blue space accessibility (coastal proximity, blue space proximity, surface water coverage in radial buffers) and the amount of leisure-time physical activity or walking undertaken in the last week in 18 countries using mixed models. Using the BlueHealth International Survey (a harmonised 18-country survey primarily focused on the relationship between recreational contact with blue spaces and human health and wellbeing), we were also able to detect whether energy expenditure on recreational visits to blue space mediated the relationship between access to blue spaces and physical activity. We detected mixed relationships between blue space accessibility and physical activity attainment, with strong between-country differences. In addition, different accessibility metrics yielded different results. Results of mediation analyses will be presented at the conference. The findings have implications for urban planning and the protection of blue spaces as a public health resource, but no universal conclusions can be made regarding blue space accessibility and physical activity outcomes. The results additionally suggest choosing accessibility metrics based on theories or models of the exposure-health relationship as it can greatly influence conclusions.

Toxicant inhalation among singleton waterpipe tobacco users in natural settings

BackgroundStudies that assess waterpipe tobacco smoking behaviour and toxicant exposure generally use controlled laboratory environments with small samples that may not fully capture real-world variability in human behaviour and waterpipe...

Building Strategy to Promote Tourism Destination Attractiveness and Competitiveness in Developing Area: A Case of Bojonegoro Regency, East Java, Indonesia

Bojonegoro, which is literally one of the regencies in East Java – Indonesia, has established tourism attractions in the country. The present paper aims to assess the relative attractiveness of tourist destination competitiveness on the basis of tourism strategy in Bojonegoro. It presents our efforts to develop a tourism way that integrates the natural, cultural and art, culinary and artificial tourism in Bojonegoro. The practical implications are both for tourist operators and policy makers. The value of alternate tourism strategies based on the tourist’s impact upon the host culture becomes increasingly critical. There are three major implications for both the public and private sectors to achieve long-term sustainability, i.e., ensuring sustainable use of natural environment, enhancing the reliability of access modes to the destination, and improving the quality of lodging facilities and catering services. Conclusions are provided with a discussion of the specific insights gained from technical experiences that may serve others in addressing similar issues.

Natural Environments and Leisure among Rural–to–Urban Immigrants: An Application of Bourdieu's Concepts of Habitus, Social and Cultural Capital, and Field

ABSTRACTThis study explored the use of natural environments for leisure among rural-to-urban immigrants by adopting Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, social and cultural capital, and field. Data were collected with the use of individual interviews with 27 participants, including Mexican immigrants in the United States, Ukrainian immigrants in Poland, Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, and Turkish immigrants in Germany. The findings showed that for some immigrants, practices of social capital maintenance became disconnected from recreation in natural environments, while for all participants, nature-related cultural capital had low transferability in a migratory situation. Depending on their position in a new social field, immigrants developed different strategies to use local natural environments for leisure. Some strategies contributed to preserving old habitus, while one strategy (finding substitutes) contributed to gradual changes in immigrants' nature-related habitus. We suggest that embodied and emplaced skills of using nature should be incorporated in the notion of cultural capital.

Fieldwork, Sustainability, and Environmental Education: The Centrality of Geographical Inquiry

AbstractCommon notions around the concept of sustainability tend to be framed within the values and principles that the world's natural environments need to be used and managed in such a way as to make them available for future generations. Consequently, pedagogical approaches in environmental education that follow this intellectual thread tend to adopt a standard scientific approach to inquiry-based learning. This article argues that the features of a geographical approach to inquiry, particularly in its wider conceptualisation of fieldwork, provides a much more effective means of developing an environmental education that is more cogniscent of the deeper aspects of sustainability. While the importance of the natural systems components of sustainability cannot be ignored, they tend to displace other inherent facets within the sustainability concept and, in particular, the reality that any discussion as to the sustainable use of natural environments must incorporate knowledge and understanding of the way people interact with these environments. We contend that sustainability, when taught in schools, has tended to be environmentally and scientifically based, diminishing the role of humans. In an example of how this deficit might be overcome, the Australian Curriculum incorporates sustainability as one of the three mandatory cross-curriculum priorities; that is, one of the avenues for encouraging complementary learning and teaching across different disciplines. Within this curriculum framework, the concept is expanded to not only include a consideration of the mutual interdependence of the environmental spheres (Systems), but also World View and Futures — thus including the human component. However, using the notion of the fieldwork imperative (Casinader & Kidman, 2017), which distinguishes between the reasons why we do fieldwork and the reasons why we should do fieldwork, we argue that sustainability education would be placed more effectively within the disciplinary domain of Geography, rather than as part of an integrated curriculum approach or in Science.

Feasibility of a Mobile Phone App to Support Recovery From Addiction in China: Secondary Analysis of a Pilot Study.

BackgroundMobile health technologies have been found to improve the self-management of chronic diseases. However, there is limited research regarding their feasibility in supporting recovery from substance use disorders (SUDs) in China.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to examine the feasibility of a mobile phone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) app by testing the concordance of drug use assessed by the EMA, urine testing, and a life experience timeline (LET) assessment.MethodsA total of 75 participants dependent on heroin or amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS) in Shanghai were recruited to participate in a 4-week pilot study. Of the participants, 50 (67% [50/75]) were randomly assigned to the experimental group and 25 (33% [25/75]) were assigned to the control group. The experimental group used mobile health (mHealth) based EMA technology to assess their daily drug use in natural environments and received 2 short health messages each day, whereas the control group only received 2 short health messages each day from the app. Urine tests and LET assessments were conducted each week and a post-intervention survey was administered to both groups. The correlations among the EMA, the LET assessment, and the urine test were investigated.ResultsThe mean age of the participants was 41.6 (SD 8.0) years, and 71% (53/75) were male. During the 4 weeks of observation, 690 daily EMA survey data were recorded, with a response rate of 49.29% (690/1400). With respect to drug use, the percent of agreement between the EMA and the LET was 66.7%, 79.2%, 72.4%, and 85.8%, respectively, for each of the 4 weeks, whereas the percent of agreement between the EMA and the urine test was 51.2%, 65.1%, 61.9%, and 71.5%, respectively. The post-intervention survey indicated that 46% (32/70) of the participants preferred face-to-face interviews rather than the mHealth app.ConclusionsThis study demonstrated poor agreement between the EMA data and the LET and found that the acceptance of mHealth among individuals with SUDs in China was not positive. Hence, greater efforts are needed to improve the feasibility of mHealth in China.

FNIRS differentiates cognitive workload between concussed adolescents and healthy controls

fNIRS differentiates cognitive workload between concussed adolescents and healthy controls

Quantification of the Natural Factors’ Impact Effectiveness on Environmental Hazards – Slope Movements in the Flysch Areas of the Kysuce Region

Abstract The flysch areas belong to the territories with highest occurrence of landslides in Slovakia. Almost 67% of all landslides in Slovakia take place within the Carpathian flysch. It is a type of slope deformation that responds sensitively to the quality of individual factors that form the landscape and to the change in natural conditions. The occurrence of various geodynamic phenomena can be understood as a geological barrier that reduces or inhibits the use of natural environment and negatively affects the life of society and territorial development. In this paper, we evaluate the statistical significance of selected natural factors of the landscape in relation to the occurrence of unstable slopes in the Kysuce region. In addition, we also evaluated the expansion of unstable slopes in individual landscape factors. Significant linkages between the variables’ hydrogeological base_sandstones with thin clay layers (HB_s) and geological-substrate complex_loamy wastes to loamy-stony debris on sandy conglomerates (GSC_sc) (R = 0.95, p = 0.002) and secondary significant linkages between the variables soil type: Dystric Cambisols (S_CMd) and HB_s (R = 0.40, p = 0.002) (Klokočov and Zákopčie cadastres) were observed. Significant correlation of variables within the areas with unstable slopes was also observed between hydrogeological base_sandy flysch (HB_sf) and geological-substrate complex_loamy wastes on flysch stones (GSC_fs) (R = 0.81, p = 0.002) (Nová Bystrica and Kysucké Nové Mesto cadastres). The most unstable slopes occur in Nová Bystrica cadastre (34.62% of the area) and in the Klokočov cadastre (28.25% of the area). The inclination of slopes (especially slopes above 12°) plays an important role within the unstable slopes. Slopes with steep inclination cover up to 81.45% of the cadastral area of Nová Bystrica, of which almost 1/3 are unstable slopes.

Changes in recreation participation in natural environments after immigration among immigrants in the U.S., Netherlands, Germany and Poland

This study examines the use of natural environments for recreation among immigrants and factors that led to changes in their use of natural environments between home and host countries. The data were collected through individual interviews with 13 Latino and 13 Chinese immigrants in the U.S., 15 Ukrainian and 11 Vietnamese immigrants in Poland, 9 Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands and 9 Turkish immigrants in Germany. The findings show that changes in the use of natural environments for recreation are related to different types of nature in home and host countries, access-related issues, quality of natural environments, work focus among immigrants, transportation problems, cultural differences, lack of knowledge of opportunities, life stage and ageing. Based on the findings, we develop a model that outlines different types of interaction with natural environments among immigrants following their settlement in the host countries.

Comparative Study of Wavelet-Based Unsupervised Ocular Artifact Removal Techniques for Single-Channel EEG Data.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a technique for recording the asynchronous activation of neuronal firing inside the brain with non-invasive scalp electrodes. Artifacts, such as eye blink activities, can corrupt these neuronal signals. While ocular artifact (OA) removal is well investigated for multiple channel EEG systems, in alignment with the recent momentum toward minimalistic EEG systems for use in natural environments, we investigate unsupervised and effective removal of OA from single-channel streaming raw EEG data. In this paper, the unsupervised wavelet transform (WT) decomposition technique was systematically evaluated for the effectiveness of OA removal for a single-channel EEG system. A set of seven raw EEG data set was analyzed. Two commonly used WT methods, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT), were applied. Four WT basis functions, namely, haar, coif3, sym3, and bior4.4, were considered for OA removal with universal threshold and statistical threshold (ST). To quantify OA removal efficacy from single-channel EEG, five performance metrics were utilized: correlation coefficients, mutual information, signal-to-artifact ratio, normalized mean square error, and time-frequency analysis. The temporal and spectral analysis shows that the optimal combination could be DWT with ST with coif3 or bior4.4 to remove OA among 16 combinations. This paper demonstrates that the WT can be an effective tool for unsupervised OA removal from single-channel EEG data for real-time applications.

Preservice Professional Preparation and Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Appraisals of Natural Environment and Inclusion Practices

This paper includes results from a study that examined the relationships between teacher discipline, type of teaching degree, and teacher feelings of preparedness and the self-efficacy beliefs (competence and confidence) of early intervention and preschool teachers with regard to either natural environment or inclusion practices. The participants were 1,178 educators employed in either Part C early intervention ( n = 615) or Part B (619) preschool special education ( n = 563) programs in 45 United States, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Results showed that feelings of preservice teacher preparedness were related to the self-efficacy beliefs of both early intervention and preschool special education teachers, and that teacher discipline and the type of degree moderated the relationship between teacher preparedness and self-efficacy beliefs among preschool special education but not early intervention teachers. Implications for understanding preservice factors contributing to teacher adoption and use of natural environment or inclusion practices are described.

Is physical activity in natural environments better for mental health than physical activity in other environments?

Experimental evidence suggests that there may be synergy between the psychological benefits of physical activity, and the restorative effects of contact with a natural environment; physical activity in a natural environment might produce greater mental health benefits than physical activity elsewhere. However, such experiments are typically short-term and, by definition, artificially control the participant types, physical activity and contact with nature. This observational study asked whether such effects can be detected in everyday settings at a population level. It used data from the Scottish Health Survey 2008, describing all environments in which respondents were physically active. Associations were sought between use of each environment, and then use of environments grouped as natural or non-natural, and the risk of poor mental health (measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)) and level of wellbeing (measured by the Warwick Edinburgh Mental health and Wellbeing Score (WEMWBS). Results showed an independent association between regular use of natural environments and a lower risk of poor mental health, but not for activity in other types of environment. For example, the odds of poor mental health (GHQ ≥ 4) among those regularly using woods or forests for physical activity were 0.557 (95% CI 0.323–0.962), compared to non-users. However, regular use of natural environments was not clearly associated with greater wellbeing, whilst regular use of non-natural environments was. The study concludes that physical activity in natural environments is associated with a reduction in the risk of poor mental health to a greater extent than physical activity in other environments, but also that activity in different types of environment may promote different kinds of positive psychological response. Access to natural environments for physical activity should be protected and promoted as a contribution to protecting and improving population mental health.

Natural Environments and their Impact on Activity, Health, and Quality of Life

This paper draws evidence from studies designed to explore the relationship between access to natural open spaces and physical activity, health, and quality of life. The research investigated patterns of woodland and green space visits for different kinds and levels of activity, relating these to perceptions, experience, and barriers to use by different groups across a range of UK contexts. Segments of the population targeted include deprived urban communities, black and minority ethnic groups within such communities, and older adults across different regions of Britain. The findings show certain consistent patterns in active use of natural environments, and in attractors and barriers to use. They suggest that natural open space offers opportunities for peace, relaxation, and social activities and, for many, physical activity is a secondary benefit, rather than a primary purpose in visits. Nonetheless, recent longitudinal work points to a causal relationship between improvements to the quality and accessibility of natural environments and levels of active use. Innovative conjoint analysis methods offer insights into what attributes of the physical environment might be most effective to change in such interventions and how they might be used to address health inequalities for different population segments.

Developing an evaluation model for destination attractiveness: sustainable forest recreation tourism in Taiwan

This study explores the opinions of an expert panel on factors affecting the attractiveness of forest recreation tourism in Taiwan. Twenty-three determinants of destination attractiveness were selected by reviewing the relevant literature. The relative importance of these determinants was analyzed by a panel of experts using the Analytical Hierarchy Process method. Results show that the uniqueness of forest landscapes and scenery and special climate phenomena are two of the most important attributes determining the attractiveness of forest recreation tourism. The reliability and convenience of access to forest recreation sites owing to their remote location are also highly evaluated. The provision of high-quality accommodation and cuisine is considered an essential component to enrich visitors’ recreational experience in forest settings. The major implications for both the public and private sectors to achieve long-term sustainability are threefold: ensuring sustainable use of natural environment, enhancing the reliability of access modes to the destination, and improving the quality of lodging facilities and catering services. Together these three requirements can help create socioeconomic sustainability in remote forest communities with limited alternative employment opportunities.

Effects of Place Identity, Place Dependence, and Experience-Use History on Perceptions of Recreation Impacts in a Natural Setting

It is generally accepted that recreation use in natural environments results in some degree of negative social and environmental impact. Environmental managers are tasked with mitigating the impact while providing beneficial recreation opportunities. Research on the factors that influence visitors' perceptions of environmental and social conditions is necessary to inform sound environmental management of protected natural areas. This study examines the effect of prior experience with the setting and two dimensions of place attachment (i.e., place identity and place dependence) on visitors' perceptions of three types of recreation impacts (i.e., depreciative behavior, environmental impacts, and recreation conflict). Principal components analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling were used to test the study hypotheses using data collected from 351 visitors through on-site questionnaires (response rate of 93 percent). The results show that prior experience exhibited a moderate and significant direct positive effect on place identity, place dependence, and visitors' perceptions of recreation impacts. Contrary to study hypotheses and prior research, neither place dependence nor place identity exhibited a significant effect on the dependent variables. The results show that prior experience causes visitors to be more sensitive to depreciative behaviors, environmental impacts, and recreation conflict. These findings raise concerns over potential visitor displacement and deterioration of site conditions. Implications for resource managers are discussed, which include education, modifying visitor use patterns, and site design strategies.

A study on the relationship between meaning and use in natural environment(Summaries of the 15^<th> Annual Meeting)

A study on the relationship between meaning and use in natural environment(Summaries of the 15^<th> Annual Meeting)

Psychological restoration in nature as a source of motivation for ecological behaviour

People may behave in environmentally friendly ways because they gain psychologically from their experiences in natural environments. Psychological benefits of nature experience may also underlie concerns about personally harmful effects of environmental problems. Cross-sectional survey data from 1413 Norwegian adults were used to assess the relationship between use of natural environments for psychological restoration and ecological behaviour, as mediated by personal environmental concern. Mediation tests with hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence of partial mediation; the use of natural environments for restoration remained a significant predictor of ecological behaviour after the entry of environmental concern into the analysis. These associations held independently of age, gender, education, household income, size of community of upbringing, size of community of current residence and distance of current residence from an outdoor recreation area. Among sociodemographic variables, only gender had a significant association with the use of natural environments for restoration, suggesting that their use transcends several important social categories in Norway. In short, positive experiences in natural environments may promote ecological behaviour.

Advanced optical technologies for monitoring estuaries and coastal environments

In recent years the need to monitor different parameters has led to the development of several architectures able to make real time, un-attended measurements. Particularly in regard to environmental issues, it is very important that the equipment and measuring systems be small and light to avoid maximum interference of the ecosystems studied. In this context, optical fibre sensors have become extremely attractive for use in natural environments to monitor different parameters of biological interest, due to their intrinsic small weight and size and low reactivity to chemical and biological parameters. In this paper we present an innovative and technologically advanced system for the simultaneous measurement of temperature and salinity based on optical fibre Bragg grating sensors and on an optical sensing cable especially designed for large-scale and distributed or quasi-distributed measurements. A prototype of this optical cable was installed in the Mira Channel at Ria de Aveiro, Portugal. Temperature variation during three weeks from 4 to 23 June 2002 is investigated and presented here.

Early Intervention Practitioner Approaches to Natural Environment Interventions

Practitioner beliefs about and understanding of natural environment interventions were examined. Sixteen early intervention practitioners from two programs in a southeastern state were interviewed about their understanding and use of natural environments as sources of learning opportunities for young children. Practitioners in one program had considerable experience with natural environment interventions, whereas those in the other program had little or no experience with natural environment interventions. Results indicated considerable variability and understanding between experienced and novice practitioners about the sources and characteristics of natural environment practices. Implications for promoting practitioners' understanding and adoption of natural learning environment practices are described.

The Recreational Use of Natural Environments by Danish and New Zealand Tertiary Students

AbstractThe purpose of the study was to compare demographic profiles, agents of socialisation on participation in outdoor activities and preferences for spending time in natural areas of New Zealand and Danish physical education students. The data were gathered by questionnaire from 270 Danish and 241 Mew Zealand students. New Zealand students expressed a stronger perception of being an outdoor person and may be linked to the fact that 12% of the Danish students have lived their lives in rural areas in contrast to 30% of the New Zealand students. Further, school and sport clubs were ranked higher by New Zealand students as factors of influence on outdoor life activities. Friends and parents/family were the most influential agencies of socialisation with no differences between nations. More than 92% of the Danish and New Zealand students had previous experiences of longer lasting outdoor trips. The study provide data for ongoing interpretation and create a basis for questions and reflections for the benefit of students in both institutions.