Interacting with Urban Nature for Health

General Sessions

Speaker(s):

Johanna Bock, UBC Urban Forestry

Johanna Bock is a PhD student in Urban Forestry at the University of British Columbia where she examines benefits of urban green space use for human well-being. With an MS in health and ecopsychology, her interest lies in the mechanisms that keep persons living in diverse urban environments healthy and happy. Johanna’s research combines different types of data – public participation GIS, traditional survey formats, census and landcover data. She is a member of the Urban Natures Lab at UBC and am also part of a research collaboration between UBC and Rogers communications Inc. that explores the application of new technologies in the context of urban forest management, and how these are perceived and used by the public.

Topic

Interacting with Urban Nature for Health

This seminar will provide an overview of my PhD and project work so far, starting off with an overview of the different approaches to thinking about human health in nature and the benefits we derive from interacting with nature. I will then present some of the findings from our green space user survey in the City of Vancouver, as an example of how urban residents use their surrounding nature with implications for human health.