Dr. Maria Garcia Martin

Stress-related illnesses are a major problem among urban societies. Greenspaces near residential areas are crucial for supporting mental well-being and mitigating urban stressors. While various studies have demonstrated the benefits of greenspaces for stress recovery, the constraints to experiencing these benefits are less explored. This study aims to explore the multidimensional factors constraining psychological restoration in everyday outdoor activities, to inform urban planning and enhance environmental psychology theories. In an online survey 1134 Swiss residents were presented with an open-ended question about the constraints they experienced during their latest outdoor activity, along with closed-ended questions about their personal traits, the activity performed, and the restorativeness of the experience. Through an inductive coding process followed by a deductive classification, we identified a wide range of constraints and categorized them into structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal constraints, further distinguishing between supply and demand factors. Structural supply constraints were predominant, particularly overcrowding, traffic, and noise, which negatively correlated with the perceived restorativeness of the environment. Intrapersonal demand constraints, such as thoughts and stress were mentioned frequently, and hindered restoration outcomes. Women and younger adults were more frequently affected by these constraints. Results underscore the subjective and context-dependent nature of restorative experiences in everyday environments, shaped by the interplay of individual, societal, and environmental factors. Our findings highlight the need for inclusive planning and social measures to support vulnerable groups in enhancing the restorative potential of outdoor activities in nearby greenspaces.

Greenness and noise are important environmental determinants of human health. The rapid urbanization and population growth have intensified the densification of urban environments, escalating traffic noise and the depletion of green spaces.
Our study aims to explore the role of greenness as a facilitator and noise exposure as an impediment to psychological restoration in people's daily environments, examining the interplay between environmental factors, individual perceptions, and personal traits.
We employ a conceptual model where the effects of road traffic noise and greenness on restoration are mediated by perceived landscape factors and moderated by personal traits. We collected data through an online participatory survey of about 1500 Swiss respondents. Respondents were asked to indicate the level of restoration they obtained from looking out of their window at home and from their last restorative outdoor activity. Our analysis combines biophysical and acoustical georeferenced data with perceived survey data and uses multiple mediation analysis technics, i.e., structural equation modelling.
Results indicate that greenness and traffic noise exposure are only marginally linked to psychological restoration outcomes. However, they are strongly associated with perceived landscape aspects, such as the feeling of being in nature and noise annoyance, which in turn are linked to these outcomes. Personal traits, including connectedness with nature and stress levels, also play a critical role in shaping restoration outcomes.
Our study highlights the complex dynamics between environmental factors, personal perceptions, and restoration outcomes, emphasizing the pivotal role of perceived feeling of being in nature and personal traits in psychological restoration.

Long-term exposure to noise is linked to various adverse effects on human health. Growing evidence suggests that residential green spaces can positively influence a wide range of health outcomes. Noise annoyance is a key factor examined in the literature in this context. We present findings from two large-scale studies conducted in Switzerland (combined n= 3,340 participants), one in the city of Zurich and one nationwide. Road traffic noise annoyance data was collected and regressed on exposure to (a) road traffic noise and (b) residential green around participants' home location. Higher exposure-response curves were found for the nationwide sample compared to the Zurich sample. Importantly, more residential green was associated with lower annoyance at comparable road traffic noise exposure. These findings highlight the positive, mitigating influence of natural green on negative noise-induced outcomes.

Noise exposure has been linked to numerous adverse health effects. However, research has demonstrated the beneficial role of natural green on human well-being and stress restoration. This study aimed to elucidate the association of exposure to road traffic noise (RTN) and residential green with annoyance, and evaluate the relative importance of road traffic compared to other noise sources based on two surveys: a cross-sectional field study in the city of Zurich (n = 1,111), and a nationwide survey across Switzerland (n = 2,229). Exposure-response curves of long-term noise annoyance regressed on residential green (normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI) and road traffic noise exposure at the participants' home (day-evening-night level L_den) were established. Results from the nationwide sample showed a significant negative association of residential green with noise annoyance: Increasing greenness from the 5^th to 95^th percentile NDVI was associated with strongly reduced RTN annoyance, corresponding to an equivalent sound level reduction of 4 dB. For the city of Zurich sample, this difference amounted to a non-significant 3 dB. In a general assessment of noise sources, survey respondents in both samples rated noise from construction sites as similarly annoying as from road traffic. The results underscore a potentially beneficial role of urban green in decreasing RTN annoyance, and pinpoint relevant noise sources beyond road traffic. Our findings highlight current issues of source-specific noise within communities and suggest the need for policies that integrate noise reduction and green space expansion, enhancing restorative environments and thus mitigating noise impacts for public health.

Biocultural approaches that acknowledge the multiple and dynamic relationships between the diversity of cultures and nature are growing in popularity in sustainability research. Scientific contributions to biocultural approaches written in Spanish are numerous, including influential work on biocultural memory, biocultural heritage and biocultural ethics. However, despite linguistic diversity being considered essential in knowledge production for assuring broad and balanced evidence to successfully cope with sustainability challenges, non-English literature is rarely reviewed and taken into account in English-language scientific knowledge production and publications. This review assesses how the scientific literature in Spanish conceptualizes and applies biocultural approaches, showing their richness beyond the Anglophone predominance in academic knowledge production and communication. The results suggest that insights from Spanish-language scientific literature could contribute alternative methodological and theoretical pathways for biocultural approaches that might foster transformations for more sustainable human-nature relationships. We conclude by highlighting avenues that could bring more plural biocultural studies.

Current agricultural practices in Europe are increasingly aggravating societal and environmental safety concerns. This creates social and regulatory pressures on farmers, which can lead to declining material and social status of farmers, farmer discontent, and anti-regulation protests. These tensions are rooted in conflicting value systems for agricultural development, which can range from productivist pathways (i.e. valuing production above all else) to increasing multifunctionality pathways (i.e. valuing agriculture for its contribution to multiple economic, environmental and societal needs). It is largely unknown to what degree individual farms and agricultural landscapes are transitioning towards increasing productivism or multifunctionality in practice. Here, we mapped landscape changes and interviewed farmers (n = 274) to examine the diversity of agricultural development pathways in 17 study sites across Europe over the last 20 years (2000–2020). We also assessed the associations between the development pathways and farmers’ perceptions of socio-economic outcomes, namely job satisfaction, societal valuation, and economic performance. Farm-level development was largely aligned with productivist pathways, while landscape-level changes aligned more closely with an increasing multifunctionality pathway. Farmers on pathways of increasing multifunctionality did not perceive improved outcomes on livelihood indicators as compared to productivist farmers. Furthermore, farms on increasing multifunctionality pathways were concentrated in sites with very high management intensities that face strong pressure from environmental regulations, as well as low-intensity, mountainous sites, where opportunities for intensification are limited. These results suggest that current pathways that increase multifunctionality arise mostly by necessity. Successful agricultural transformation will therefore require policy to create enabling environments that provide socioeconomic benefits for farmers to increase multifunctionality, and a civil society and market conditions that value sustainable agriculture.

1. The human relationship with nature is a topic that has been explored throughout human history. More recently, the idea of connection to nature has merged as an important transdisciplinary field of study. Despite increased scholarly attention to connection to nature, the notion of disconnection from nature remains undertheorized and understudied.
2. In this perspective article, we argue for a more comprehensive understanding of disconnection from nature to strengthen theories of human-nature relationships that goes beyond individual relationships and considers social and collective factors of disconnection, including institutional, socio-cultural and power dimensions.
3. Drawing on case insights, we present the ‘wheel of disconnection’ to illustrate how disconnections from nature manifest across individual or societal meaning-making processes, thereby problematizing existing research that seeks to create dualisms between human positive and negative impacts on the environment in isolation from cultural or political contexts.
4. We do not seek to discount research or important practical efforts to foster an individual's connection to nature by elevating disconnection. Instead, we hope that creating greater awareness and understanding of disconnection will be able to guide opportunities going forward for strengthening a connection to nature along a continuum from the individual to the social.

Photovoice is a participatory research method based on participant-led photography and dialogue. It is particularly suited to engaging vulnerable groups to visually document a specific issue that affects their personal lives. Because photovoice is based on images and language alike, it encourages participants to reflect on the issue and elevates marginalized voices by facilitating the expression of local knowledge, opinions, and experiences and allowing participants to identify their concerns and priorities.

Green spaces and natural environments are essential for quality of life, as they influence health behaviours and outcomes positively. The quantification of "greenness" observable from the human perspective is of great interest, especially in urban environments where built-up areas and infill are expanding. In this paper, we present a method based on airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds that makes it possible to simulate a space observed from the human perspective and to quantify the surrounding vegetation. The method can be applied over various spatial scales, in urban, suburban and rural regions. We employed this new method to analyse a set of specific locations in Switzerland that are important for people to recover from everyday stress. The greenness quantification can be used to compare the perceived restorative quality of landscape characteristics with physical landscape qualities. Our approach provides a viable methodological solution for spatial planning and large-scale socio-ecological studies on the influence of natural and green spaces on health and wellbeing, and we recommend that it be applied in the natural landscape and in urban areas.

Grünflächen und naturnahe Flächen sind für die Lebensqualität von wesentlicher Bedeutung, da sie sich positiv auf die Gesundheit und das Wohlbefinden auswirken. In der Schweiz leben heute ungefähr drei Viertel der Einwohner in Städten und Agglomerationen, daher ist die Qualität und Zugänglichkeit von Grün- und Naturräumen (GNR) von grossem Interesse. In dieser Studie haben wir Orte analysiert, an denen sich die Schweizer Bevölkerung vom Stress im Alltag erholt. Das ganzheitliche GIS-basierte Konzept zur Beschreibung dieser Orte folgt einem dreistufigen Top-Down-Ansatz und bezieht sich auf verschiedene Massstäbe, Aspekte und Details der Beschreibung. Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich ausschliesslich mit der detailliertesten Ebene. Auf der Grundlage von Airborne Laserscanning (ALS)-Punktwolken haben wir eine Methode entwickelt, um den Raum aus der menschlichen Perspektive zu simulieren und die sichtbare nahegelegene Vegetation zu quantifizieren. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die entwickelte Methode und eine Erläuterung der Interpretation der Ergebnisse und zeigt Anwendungsmöglichkeiten auf.

Green spaces and natural environments are essential for quality of life as they have a positive impact on health and well-being. In Switzerland, about three quarters of the population now live in cities and agglomerations, so the quality and accessibility of green and natural spaces (GNS) is of great interest there. In this study, we analysed places where the Swiss population recovers from stress in everyday life. The holistic GIS-based concept for describing these places follows a three-level top-down approach and refers to different scales, aspects and details of the description. The present study deals exclusively with the most detailed level. Based on airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds, we have developed an effective method to simulate the space from a human perspective and quantify the visible nearby vegetation. This paper gives an overview of the developed method and a detailed explanation of the interpretation of the results, and shows its possible applications.

Farming in Europe has been the scene of several important socio-economic and environmental developments and crises throughout the last century. Therefore, an understanding of the historical driving forces of farm change helps identifying potentials for navigating future pathways of agricultural development. However, long-term driving forces have so far been studied, e.g. in anecdotal local case studies or in systematic literature reviews, which often lack context dependency. In this study, we bridged local and continental scales by conducting 123 oral history interviews (OHIs) with elderly farmers across 13 study sites in 10 European countries. We applied a driving forces framework to systematically analyse the OHIs. We find that the most prevalent driving forces were the introduction of new technologies, developments in agricultural markets that pushed farmers for farm size enlargement and technological optimisation, agricultural policies, but also cultural aspects such as cooperation and intergenerational arrangements. However, we find considerable heterogeneity in the specific influence of individual driving forces across the study sites, implying that generic assumptions about the dynamics and impacts of European agricultural change drivers hold limited explanatory power on the local scale. Our results suggest that site-specific factors and their historical development will need to be considered when addressing the future of agriculture in Europe in a scientific or policy context.

Globally, around 0.78 billion rural people live in close proximity to forests and have been considered "forest-dwelling" and/or "forest dependent". Forest dependency has so far been mainly studied in material terms, while the non-material relationships to forests have been addressed less frequently. To fill this gap, the general objective of this study is to assess forest-dwelling people's relationship to their community, their livestock, and their forest landscapes through a relational values and human-nature connectedness lens. Using the Zagros mountains in Iran as a case study, we conducted individual interviews with 35 villagers who live within forest landscapes and that are engaged in pastoral activities. Emerging themes were identified and categorized by qualitative analysis. We found that forest dwellers emphasized a complex array of values that relate to their community, their livestock, and their landscapes. These values included experiential, emotional, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions of human-nature connectedness. Respondents expressed an erosion of values and practices related to community, livestock, and landscapes and articulated very few positive visions for the future of these values and practices. We conclude that participatory processes and tools may be valuable for empowering forest-dwelling people to identify pathways toward a desirable future. We encourage landscape conservation strategies to become socially inclusive by considering people's deep relational values and their landscape stewardship practices.

Rural abandonment is a significant process in the Mediterranean region, posing sustainability challenges for rural and urban areas. Although there is an increase in studies focusing on the ecological implications and impacts of land abandonment and the role of rewilding, there is a knowledge gap in the study of the socio-cultural dimension of abandonment from the local perspective, even though it is crucial for land management decision. This study focuses on a case study in Western Spain, where a social survey was used to assess the perceptions of local communities regarding land abandonment and their implication on nature's contributions to people and quality of life. A survey campaign was administered in the case study region during the summer of 2020, collecting 205 face-to-face surveys. The results show that local communities overall have a negative reaction toward rural abandonment. In addition, local respondents recognize how traditional agriculture is the main source for maintaining nature's contributions to human well-being. Additionally, four groups of narratives toward rural abandonment were identified representing clusters of respondents with different motivations and interpretations of rural abandonment. This paper calls for understanding better the perceptions, values, and motivations toward rural abandonment and how their outcomes can be used as input for landscape management. Our results indicate that the local population perceives that the loss of rural livelihoods may entail serious environmental and societal problems, as locals are forced to abandon their rural-associated ways of life and migrate to urban areas.

Landscape approaches are gaining momentum in both scientific and policy agendas. However, landscape approaches comprise a multitude of concepts, approaches and principles, which are in part similar, in some parts different or even contradictory. In this paper, we used a Q-method questionnaire to explore how landscape approaches are understood and employed in 45 case studies of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes derived from the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI), as well as the motivations for employing them. Our analysis revealed that all landscape approaches pursued very similar goals, namely to ensure that local communities as landscape stewards have the capacity to preserve context-specific values in the face of socio-economic and environmental changes. The tools for reaching such goals are built upon people and nature feedback dynamics that crystalize in rich biodiversity and local ecological knowledge. However, our analysis also showed that the means to reach those goals differed depending on many contextual factors, such as the dominant ecosystems and socio-economic activities in the landscape, the constellation of actors or the most relevant drivers of change affecting the social-ecological system. In particular, we identified four distinct lenses in which landscapes approaches are applied in practice to landscape sustainability: (1) for the preservation of natural values, (2) for the preservation of socio-cultural values, (3) for the promotion of social justice and participatory governance, and (4) for securing food security and local livelihoods. Our results showed an association between the choice of a lens and the value types motivating the use of a landscape approach. Relational values were associated with a focus on landscape conservation and safeguard of social–ecological values. Our study highlights the relevant and beneficial role of landscape approaches as a boundary concept and emphasizes the need for transdisciplinary and participatory methods within landscape research and practice to navigate the context-specific options for implementation of landscape approaches.

Urban areas are constantly growing, and densification is a common strategy to limit settlement expansion. However, this leads to loss of green spaces (GSs) and increasing noise pollution, which is detrimental to public health. Within a research project that aims at elucidating the stress-easing potential of green spaces in noise-polluted environments and the mediating and/or moderating role of annoyance, an extended cross-sectional field study will be performed in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. In total, 5000 participants will be contacted in three waves, during which an online survey will be carried out followed by a visit to a subsample at home to collect hair cortisol probes. Participants of this study were selected according to the characteristics of their residences (stratified by accessibility to GSs and noise exposure). Further, traits of individuals in addition to acoustic and non-acoustic attributes of GSs are accounted. Thus, the association of noise annoyance, perceived stress and long-term physiological stress responses among residents exposed to different road traffic noise levels and with different grades of access to GSs are studied. In this contribution, the study protocol and first results of a pilot study with 256 participants will be shown.

Participatory mapping is a useful approach to engage the general public and stakeholders to communicate place-based values, behaviour, preferences and observations. The approach informs social-ecological research and land-use planning. In land-use planning, PPGIS is applicable, for example, in initial phases or for assessing project outcomes. This toolkit gives guidance on participatory mapping surveys.

Landscape products link to low-input practices and traditional ecological knowledge, and have multiple functions supporting human well-being and sustainability. Here we explore seven landscape products worldwide to identify these multiple functions in the context of food commodification and landscape sustainability. We show that a landscape products lens can improve food systems by fostering sustainability strategies and standards that are place-sensitive, and as such can mitigate conflicts related to food production, social justice and the environment. Co-management strategies and information policies, such as certification, labelling, product information and raising of awareness could accelerate, incentivize and catalyse actions to support landscape products in the context of sustainability strategies.

It has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic affected some agricultural systems more than others, and even within geographic regions, not all farms were affected to the same extent. To build resilience of agricultural systems to future shocks, it is key to understand which farms were affected and why. In this study, we examined farmers’ perceived robustness to COVID-19, a key resilience capacity. We conducted standardized farmer interviews (n = 257) in 15 case study areas across Europe, covering a large range of socio-ecological contexts and farm types. Interviews targeted perceived livelihood impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on productivity, sales, price, labor availability, and supply chains in 2020, as well as farm(er) characteristics and farm management. Our study corroborates earlier evidence that most farms were not or only slightly affected by the first wave(s) of the pandemic in 2020, and that impacts varied widely by study region. However, a significant minority of farmers across Europe reported that the pandemic was “the worst crisis in a lifetime” (3%) or “the worst crisis in a decade” (7%). Statistical analysis showed that more specialized and intensive farms were more likely to have perceived negative impacts. From a societal perspective, this suggests that highly specialized, intensive farms face higher vulnerability to shocks that affect regional to global supply chains. Supporting farmers in the diversification of their production systems while decreasing dependence on service suppliers and supply chain actors may increase their robustness to future disruptions.