Online
Welcome to the second Urban Forests seminar of the fall semester. This time, we welcome Sjerp de Vries, researcher in Environmental psychology at the University of Wageningen. Dr. de Vries presentation will deal with greenspaces and their effect on mental and physical health.
Environmental psychologist mainly doing research on landscape appreciation, outdoor recreation, and effects of contact with nature on human health and well-being. Partial to quantitative methods: experiments, intervention studies, surveys, and model development.
Numerous studies have shown beneficial associations between the availability of nearby greenspace and a wide range of mental as well as physical health outcomes. However, it is still unclear how precisely such associations come about. Answering that question is important, because it will give indications about how much greenspace, of which type(s) is most conducive to generating specific health benefits.
The webinar will start with a brief overview of the most prominent protective associations. After that, the Environment for Health Impact Assessment (E4HIA) framework will be introduced, as a basis for discussing several mechanisms by which nearby nature is suggested to affect one’s health beneficially, and what is needed to make them work well.
The webinar series on Urban Forests is arranged by SLU Urban Futures and SLU Future Forests to shed light on various aspects and opportunities for research on forests in urban environments.
See the recorded presentations from previous webinars here.
Future Forests
Future Forests is a platform for multidisciplinary forest research, collaboration and research communication, driven by SLU, Umeå University and the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden.
SLU Urban Futures
Among the four SLU Future Platforms SLU Urban Futures has the mission to strengthen sustainable urban development. The platform aims to identify knowledge needs and strives to develop new research questions addressing the challenges of an urbanising planet.
Associate professor
Department of Forest Biomaterials and Technology,
SLU Urban Futures (Umeå Hub Coordinator)
E-mail: dimitris.athanassiadis@slu.se
Telephone: +46(0)90 786 83 04