Benefits of Using Plants in Indoor Environments: Exploring Common Research Gaps

Abstract

The introduction of green plants in indoor spaces has raised a great amount of interest motivated by plants’ supposed capacity to improve the quality of indoor built environments. Subsequent studies have covered a broad range of topics, testing plants in indoor environments for their climate-mitigating effects, acoustic benefits, potential energy savings and the enhancement of the indoor microbial communities. Despite the diversity of focus in these studies, no major breakthroughs have been made involving the use of plants in indoor environments after nearly thirty years of research. To identify major inconsistencies and gaps in the research, this review, of an explorative nature, presents an analysis of plant-related parameters reported in 31 cases of experimental research involving the use of plants in indoor environments. The papers were identified by searching the online databases Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Scopus and MDPI and were selected based on their relevance to the topic and diversity of focus. Two classifications in table form provide an overview of the 38 plant-related parameters used in the reviewed research. The conclusions drawn from the analysis of the tables highlight a strongly anthropocentric frame of reference across the majority of the studies, which prioritize human and experimental convenience above plant physiology, and display an overall scarcity and inconsistency in the plant-related parameters reported.

Effects of Indoor Plants on Human Functions: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analyses

“…The research into the effect of plants usually focuses on the effects of single plants of different species in different conditions. Attention should further be placed on species that can cohabitate together, thus compensating each other’s needs and recreating the basic forms of symbiosis [ 121 ].…”

Infrastructure Planning and Spatial Design Towards Well-Being: An Enquiry on Custodians of Youth Institutions in Penang

“…Various scholars have suggested that placing plants around people brings multiple benefits (Persiani, 2021;Bak Yao, 2020). Plants help increase concentration and strengthen memory, create happy emotions within occupants, provide healing effects, boost human performance, and improve mental health by reducing stress through therapeutic efficacy.…”

Assessment of greenhouse emissions of the green bean through the static enclosure technique

“…Individuating large-scale effects dependent on plant emissions is demanding, although it could be estimated via extended monitoring and real-time sampling of the urban and wild environment (for instance PTR-MS), or via prediction models (Guenther et al, 2006), which could show particular trend distributions of biogenic fluxes (Chuang et al, 2011;Seco et al, 2015;Drewer et al, 2018;Coggon et al, 2021). In the city area the impact of BVOC emissions regarding green-integrated infrastructures was already theorized (Niinemets and Peñuelas, 2008;Tiwari et al, 2019;Persiani, 2021), but currently research targeting the assessment of BVOC levels in urban environments is limited (Yang et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2020).…”