Redirect to: /asmagazine/2025/02/05/path-better-mental-health-walk-park

CU Boulder researchers Colleen Reid, Emma Rieves and their colleagues explored the potential impact of objective and perceived greenspace exposure on mental health

If you or a loved one is struggling with mental health, you’re not alone. Roughly one in every five adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression over the past two weeks, according to a 2022 CDC . The good news is a better state of mind could be right in your backyard—literally.

Perceived greenspace exposure—which represents a person’s perception of the amount and quality of access to and time spent in nearby greenspace—may have a significant positive effect on certain aspects of mental health, according to from an interdisciplinary University of Colorado Boulder team.

With Associate Geography Professor Colleen Reid at the helm, researchers from the Geography, Psychology and Neuroscience departments as well as the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and the Institute of Behavioral Science explored the link between greenspace exposure and stress, anxiety and depression.

Their study revealed a strong association between perceived greenspace exposure and reduced anxiety. Could better mental health be as simple as a walk in the park? Perhaps, says lead study author and geography PhD candidate Emma Rieves.

The relationship between greenspace and mental health “isn’t just about the greenspace that’s empirically there,” which they measured by aggregating the green pixels, representing greenspace, from aerial imagery, also known as objective green space. “The relationship is mainly influenced by aspects of green space that aren’t well captured by objective measures, such as the quality of the green space, how much time someone spends in green space and how accessible it is,” she says.

Research in the time of COVID-19

Reid started the study in late 2019, says Rieves, who arrived on campus to begin her graduate education in the fall of 2020. “It was weird,” she recalls. “But the [geography] department did a lot to facilitate interactions between students despite the restrictions that were in place at the time.”

Even before Rieves dove into the research project, she had personal experience with nature’s capacity to ease her mind, particularly during the early days of lockdown. “Being in nature definitely helped to combat some of the negative emotions you have when you’re stuck sitting in your house, doomscrolling and wiping down all your produce,” she recalls.

To determine the effect of greenspace exposure on the study’s research subjects, the team had to switch gears early in the data-collection process to account for the extra stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, says Rieves.

Once COVID-19 public health restrictions were in place, however, they added pandemic-specific questions to their mental health survey so that subjects could share the extent to which they were impacted by stressors such finances, resources and the possibility of infection. Their analysis could then control for pandemic-specific variables to more accurately identify the connection between mental health and greenspace exposure, says Rieves.

Is greenspace exposure a key to mental health?

The researchers found that perceived greenspace exposure was directly linked to reduced anxiety metrics and had a borderline statistically significant relationship with lower levels of depression metrics. Meanwhile, objective greenspace exposure bore no statistically significant association with anxiety, depression or stress.

In other words, when it came to mental health, and anxiety in particular, objective greenspace exposure mattered far less than subjects’ perceptions of greenspace exposure.

“ Based on the presence of green pixels, a vacant lot full of weeds would register as having a high green space signal. But if you were there, you might not perceive it as a superabundant green space,” says Rieves. “We found that other factors, like the quality of the environment in this example, is more important to the mental health and greenspace relationship.”

At the same time, the findings revealed a positive association between socioeconomic status and both objective and perceived greenspace, where people with higher socioeconomic status had higher perceived and objective greenspace exposure.

The takeaway

While no one is promising that a walk in the woods is a magic bullet, getting out in nature is never a bad idea, says Rieves. And no matter what the pixels indicate, or how many minutes a day you spend around trees, the data indicate that people’s perceptions of their own greenspace exposure are important to unlocking better mental health, says Rieves.

“This study doesn’t prescribe any specific level of greenspace exposure needed to reap its mental health benefits, but if you feel like you’re surrounded by greenspace, it’s probably good for you.”

CU Boulder scientists Naomi Friedman and Samantha Freis contributed to this research.

Off

Off

Kate Little has received the from the Colorado School of Public Health for her project Understanding Drivers of Firearm Access Among Colorado American Indian Youth: Opportunities for School-Level Prevention. 

Project Background: American Indian and Alaska Native youth have a high risk for death by firearm suicide and tend to have quick access to firearms in Colorado. Firearm access is the most easily modifiable risk factor to prevent a firearm suicide death. The high lethality of firearms and short time window between suicide ideation and action require that researchers develop a nuanced understanding of the individual and ecological characteristics of youth with firearm access,  as these factors may be directly associated with risk of death by firearm. Understanding how youth acquire firearms and who has access, and the characteristics their schools access can inform school-based firearm suicide prevention strategies.

Project Design: The research project will use multilevel modelling techniques to understand how individual and school-level characteristics that are associated with individual firearm access among Native American and Alaska Native High School Students in Colorado, and how those characteristics differ from students of other identities.

Kate is pursuing a Master's degree in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and is a Research Analyst at the Injury and Violence Prevention Center. Her work uses GIS and statistical methods to better understand firearm harms among youth and adults and how they vary geographically.  This award will support her work in investigating the contexts of the schools in which Indigenous Colorado youth gain access to firearms. She is passionate about effectively communicating research to the affected communities and hopes that this award will help prevent firearm injuries and deaths among Indigenous Colorado youth. 

Off

Off

Off

Dr. Robin Roth 
Professor of Geography 
University of Guelph 

Abstract: 

The Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership is a Canada-wide network of Indigenous thought leaders, scholars, conservation organizations, Indigenous governments, and conservation practitioners united in their commitment to supporting the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and the transformation of existing protected areas. This presentation will discuss the work of the partnership as applied political ecology. I will discuss how key tenants of political ecology - 1) power is relational and multi-scalar, 2) the social and natural are co-constituted, 3) accepted categories of modernity need to be destabilized, and 4) transformational change is needed- are activated in the work of the partnership and, by extension, the work of decolonizing conservation. 

Off

Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi 
Assistant Professor of Geography 
University of Missouri 

Abstract: 

This presentation covers the recent work in health geography focused on vulnerable populations by Dr. Aída Guhlincozzi and colleagues. Specifically, this will cover the ongoing movement of the field in a direction of better encapsulating the needs of communities and populations previously overlooked and underserved by U.S. healthcare systems. This talk includes recently published results on Latina women’s healthcare access, discussions of race and ethnicity in the Latine community, and critical disability geography work regarding Autism and healthcare access. A key intervention recommended includes a brief discussion of the value of community geographic theoretical frameworks and methods.

Off