Benis Nchine Egoh

The mental health of U.S. college students is increasingly affected by high levels of stress, resulting in soaring rates of anxiety and depressive disorders. Spending time in nature has well-documented benefits for mental health. In the first citizen science project of its kind, we installed five Nature Wellness Stations in green spaces across the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) campus, to promote mindful engagement with nature and to evaluate its immediate effects on mental health, including perceived stress levels and mood. Each station exhibited a signpost with information on the benefits of being mindful in nature and simple instructions for a brief nature therapy practice. Participants were encouraged to disconnect from devices, observe and interact with their surroundings, and voluntarily complete a brief survey assessing their emotional state before and after their nature therapy practice. While the number of people passively utilizing the nature wellness stations remains unknown, 275 responses, primarily from students, were collected in the survey within 16 months of station installation. We found that 84 percent of participants who visited a station for the first time reported a positive perceived emotional state afterward, compared to 21 percent before station use (McNemar’s χ2 = 124.84, p < 0.001). Voluntary responses to open-ended questions highlighted stress reduction and a calmer disposition after the nature wellness experience. Logistic regression analysis of the survey data did not identify specific physical, sensory, or mindful interaction modes with the natural surroundings that had a significantly higher impact than others on the positive outcome of station use. Future explorations will focus on longer-term effects and more detailed investigations on the most impactful natural features of Nature Wellness Stations. Overall, our cost-effective, scalable intervention suggests that incorporating nature therapy into campus green spaces could support the mental health and well-being of college students.

Understanding the benefits provided by restoring overstocked forests is crucial to guiding the choice of management actions, policy initiatives, and investments by beneficiaries, that is, monetizing ecosystem services. Using stakeholder‐based fuzzy cognitive mapping, collected through workshops with natural‐resource professionals, we mapped the interactions of ecosystem services and the perceived effects of management actions on them. In line with current concerns in the California study area, we found that fire protection was perceived as central (i.e., having a high degree of congruence with other ecosystem services) with improved fire protection providing important secondary effects on other ecosystem services, notably air‐quality protection, provision of habitat, and carbon storage. Forest restoration involves multiple fuels‐reduction actions, which were perceived as benefiting fire protection, with subsets also offering strong benefits to other ecosystem services. Prescribed burning, defensible‐space creation, understory thinning, and replanting showed particularly large differences in effects when accounting for interactions of ecosystem services. Resource managers and other nonmanager professionals prioritized similar ecosystem services, with the second group placing more importance on interactions between different ecosystem services. Ecosystem‐service valuation that includes interactions offers a salient, credible, and legitimate approach to inform multi‐benefit forest management, particularly where partnerships must monetize some of those benefits to finance critical landscape restoration.

The use of recreational ecosystem services is highly dependent on the surrounding environmental and climate conditions. Due to this dependency, future recreational opportunities provided by nature are at risk from climate change. To understand how climate change will impact recreation we need to understand current recreational patterns, but traditional data is limited and low resolution. Fortunately, social media data presents an opportunity to overcome those data limitations and machine learning offers a tool to effectively use that big data. We use data from the social media site Flickr as a proxy for recreational visitation and random forest to model the relationships between social, environmental, and climate factors and recreation for the peak season (summer) in California. We then use the model to project how non-urban recreation will change as the climate changes. Our model shows that current patterns are exacerbated in the future under climate change, with currently popular summer recreation areas becoming more suitable and unpopular summer recreation areas becoming less suitable for recreation. Our model results have land management implications as recreation regions that see high visitation consequently experience impacts to surrounding ecosystems, ecosystem services, and infrastructure. This information can be used to include climate change impacts into land management plans to more effectively provide sustainable nature recreation opportunities for current and future generations. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that crowdsourced data and machine learning offer opportunities to better integrate socio-ecological systems into climate impacts research and more holistically understand climate change impacts to human well-being.

Extensively managed grasslands are recognized globally for their high biodiversity and their social and cultural values. However, their capacity to deliver multiple ecosystem services (ES) as parts of agricultural systems is surprisingly understudied compared to other production systems. We undertook a comprehensive overview of ES provided by natural and semi‐natural grasslands, using southern Africa (SA) and northwest Europe as case studies, respectively. We show that these grasslands can supply additional non‐agricultural services, such as water supply and flow regulation, carbon storage, erosion control, climate mitigation, pollination, and cultural ES. While demand for ecosystems services seems to balance supply in natural grasslands of SA, the smaller areas of semi‐natural grasslands in Europe appear to not meet the demand for many services. We identified three bundles of related ES from grasslands: water ES including fodder production, cultural ES connected to livestock production, and population‐based regulating services (e.g., pollination and biological control), which also linked to biodiversity. Greenhouse gas emission mitigation seemed unrelated to the three bundles. The similarities among the bundles in SA and northwestern Europe suggest that there are generalities in ES relations among natural and semi‐natural grassland areas. We assessed trade‐offs and synergies among services in relation to management practices and found that although some trade‐offs are inevitable, appropriate management may create synergies and avoid trade‐offs among many services. We argue that ecosystem service and food security research and policy should give higher priority to how grasslands can be managed for fodder and meat production alongside other ES. By integrating grasslands into agricultural production systems and land‐use decisions locally and regionally, their potential to contribute to functional landscapes and to food security and sustainable livelihoods can be greatly enhanced.