Nature diversity and well-being in old age

Abstract

A diverse environment, especially when this includes elements of nature, is associated with better QoL. Good quality of the green infrastructure and adding natural elements to residential areas may enhance well-being among community-dwelling older people.

Review of the Mental Health and Well-being Benefits of Biodiversity

“…The spatial scale at which the relationships were examined ranged from the national (Duarte-Tagles et al 2015;Wheeler et al 2015) to the local (Carrus et al 2015;Foo 2016;Marselle et al 2015Marselle et al , 2016. Specifically, scales considered whole countries (England (Wheeler et al 2015) and Mexico (Duarte-Tagles et al 2015)), geographical regions within countries (England (Cox et al 2017), Finland (Rantakokko et al 2018), Sweden (Annerstedt van den Bosch et al 2015), the USA (Jones 2017)) and specific places such as forests in the Klang Valley region of Malaysia (Foo 2016), protected nature reserves in Singapore (Saw et al 2015) and green spaces in Italy (Carrus et al 2015).…”

“…The number of participants varied considerably among the recently published studies: ranging from 35 (Johansson et al 2014) through to the millions (with the use of data from the national census, Wheeler et al 2015). Participant type also differed, including university students (Cracknell et al 2016(Cracknell et al , 2017Saw et al 2015) and staff (Johansson et al 2014), adults participating over the internet (White et al 2017;Wolf et al 2017), group walkers over the age of 55 (Marselle et al 2015;Marselle et al 2016), park users (Carrus et al 2015), visitors to forests (Foo 2016), and residents of specific countries or regions as previously detailed (Annerstedt van den Bosch 2015;Cox et al 2017;Duarte-Tagles et al 2015;Jones 2017;Rantakokko et al 2018;Wheeler et al 2015).…”

“…Additionally, the Biophilia hypothesis (Kellert and Wilson 1993) was also mentioned (Annerstedt van den Bosch et al 2015; Carrus et al 2015;Saw et al 2015;Wolf et al 2017), as was appraisal theory (Johansson et al 2014). Four studies (Duarte-Tagles et al 2015;Jones 2017;Rantakokko et al 2018;Wheeler et al 2015) did not articulate a theory for why or how biodiversity may be related to better health and well-being.…”

“…Seven studies assessed biodiversity at the ecosystem or habitat level. Measurement across these studies included use of secondary, geographically-referenced data to determine land cover and land use diversity using the Shannon Diversity Index (Rantakokko et al 2018;Wheeler et al 2015), eco-region diversity using the Margalef Diversity Index (Duarte-Tagles et al 2015) and access to protected areas (Saw et al 2015). Investigator categorisation of ecosystem/habitat biodiversity was used to classify environments into low, medium and high biodiversity biotopes (Johansson et al 2014) or low vs. high biodiverse green spaces (Carrus et al 2015).…”

“…9.3). Mental health was assessed in 7 studies (Annerstedt van Protected area designation (Saw et al 2015) Green spaces (Carrus et al 2015) Shannon Diversity Index of land cover (Wheeler et al 2015) and land use (Rantakokko et al 2018) Species communities Species richness Birds in the morning, and birds in the afternoon (Cox et al 2017) Birds (Wheeler et al 2015) Fish/crustaceans (Cracknell et al 2017) Animals/plants (White et al…”