RAPID: Park Usage During Mandated Social Distancing

城市由相互关联的子系统组成的复杂网络组成，由于人口密度高，以及单个事件可能在功能上相互依存的物理、社会和经济领域引发连锁效应，因此特别容易受到新冠肺炎等流行病的影响。通过观察公园使用者的行为，这项研究将注意力集中在大流行期间公园和其他自然和工程形式的绿色基础设施(GI)在费城和纽约市的居民区所扮演的复杂和潜在的对立角色。公园的作用是复杂的，一方面，参观这些场所可以通过促进社会接触、娱乐、休闲和其他心理社会过程来建立社会韧性，这些过程建立信任、产生场所依恋、社会支持、归属感和赋权，另一方面，参观公园可能会造成更多的人与人接触和/或病毒传播到操场表面、长椅、扶手、自行车架或其他表面，从而可能加速这种高度传染性疾病的传播。最重要的假设是，随着疫情的发展，越来越少的人会从事危险的公园行为，但公园最终将成为无家可归者的避难所，他们寻求社交距离，因为避难所的感染率上升，而且春夏天气有所改善。由于全国缺乏新冠肺炎检测，公园表面的拭子、采样和实验室检测被认为是不可能的。相反，这项研究的重点是观察到的公园使用者的行为，以及记录可能导致感染风险增加的使用模式。这一目标是通过实施一种通过付费公民科学家实现的新方法来实现的，该方法由数字技术实现，旨在促进将被研究的社区的经济弹性。这项工作将在一整年的时间内进行，包含12项谨慎但相互关联的任务，在费城和纽约市居民区的20-40个经过战略选择的公园执行。将成立一个咨询小组，以帮助指导工作和解释结果。在一场史无前例的国际大流行的背景下，这项研究将促进城市绿色基础设施、公民科学、城市复原力和社会生态系统等领域的知识。PI在这些领域拥有广泛的跨学科研究经验，并曾与这两个城市的政府和非政府利益攸关方合作。随着新冠肺炎的传播，这项研究将产生关于公园公共使用的新数据集，并将寻找这些观察结果与公园和社区特征之间的相关性。它还将评估失业城市居民迅速成为收集这两个大城市内重要的精细空间分辨率观测的关键人类“传感器”的可行性。这项研究将产生与城市公园和自然资源管理者相关的结果。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Comprising a complex network of interconnected subsystems, cities are particularly vulnerable to pandemics like COVID-19 due to high population densities and the fact that a single event can trigger cascading effects across functionally interdependent physical, social, and economic domains. By observing the behavior of park users, this study focuses attention on the complex and potentially opposing roles that parks and other natural and engineered forms of green infrastructure (GI) play in residential neighborhoods of Philadelphia and New York City during the pandemic. The role of parks is complex because while on one hand, visits to these sites can build social resilience by promoting social contact, recreation, leisure, and other psychosocial processes that build trust, generate place attachment, social support, and feelings of belonging and empowerment, on the other hand visits to parks could potentially accelerate spread of this highly contagious disease by creating more person to person contact and/or transmission of the virus to playground surfaces, benches, handrails, bike racks or other surfaces. The overarching hypothesis is that as the pandemic progresses, fewer and fewer people will engage in risky park behavior, but parks will eventually become havens for homeless who seek social distance as infection rates rise in shelters and the weather improves through the spring and summer. Because of the national shortage of COVID-19 testing, swabbing, sampling, and laboratory testing of parks surfaces is deemed impossible. The focus of this study is instead on the observed behavior of park users, and documentation of usage patterns that potentially pose an elevated risk of infection. This goal is approached through implementation of a novel approach through paid citizen scientists, enabled by digital technology, and designed to promote economic resilience in the very neighborhoods to be studied. The work will be conducted over the course of one full year and contains 12 discreet but interconnected tasks performed in 20-40 strategically selected parks in residential neighborhoods of Philadelphia and New York City. An Advisory Panel will be formed to help guide the work and interpret results. The research will advance knowledge in the fields of urban green infrastructure, citizen science, urban resilience, and social-ecological systems in the context of an unprecedented international pandemic. The PI has extensive interdisciplinary research experience in these fields and has worked collaboratively with governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders in the two cities before. The research will generate novel data sets regarding public use of parks as COVID-19 spreads and will search for correlations between these observations and park and neighborhood characteristics. It will also evaluate the feasibility with which unemployed urban residents can rapidly become crucial human "sensors" who collect important fine spatial resolution observations within these two large cities. The study will generate results of relevance to urban parks and natural resource managers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.