Valuing the mental health and well-being benefits of nature engagement through measures of soundscape complexity

人们越来越认识到花时间在大自然中对人类健康和福祉的价值和好处，世界各地的政府和组织现在正在开发绿色处方计划，通过与大自然接触来治疗心理健康问题并支持心理健康。2019冠状病毒病疫情凸显了这种接触的价值，无论是在当地和国家封锁对精神健康的不利影响方面，还是在此期间对大自然参与的好处的广泛认可方面。来自大自然的健康和福祉是全球重要的文化生态系统服务。然而，虽然我们知道可用的自然空间的数量可以影响这些CES，但这个空间的质量的重要性在很大程度上仍然是未知的。我们对生物多样性不同要素在推动自然与健康关系方面的作用和影响也只有有限的了解。这些知识差距限制了这些CES系统地融入更广泛的生态系统服务框架，保护和可持续发展政策，景观和城市绿地管理。声音在我们的自然体验中发挥着关键作用，特别是鸟类的歌声为户外活动提供了配乐。事实上，从沃恩·威廉的《云雀高飞》到雷切尔·卡森的《寂静的春天》，鸟类的歌声一直是我们与自然关系和评估环境质量的一个决定性组成部分。这些音轨或自然音景的声学特性可以很容易地测量。鸟类经常被用作更广泛的生物多样性的指标，鸟类群落的组成受到许多因素的影响，例如栖息地的可用性和景观结构，这些因素也会影响自然体验的质量。因此，鸟类提供的声景的声学特征可以更普遍地指示景观生物多样性的状态。因此，声景有可能通过自然参与提供生物多样性对心理健康和福祉惠益的贡献的客观衡量标准，并使这些CES更充分地融入生态系统服务框架以及自然资本政策和管理决策。在这个项目中，我们的学术研究人员和来自保护，心理健康，工业，规划和政策领域的主要利益相关者团队将开发连接景观结构，声景复杂性，声景质量感知，衍生的心理健康和福祉利益的途径的机械理解，以及实现这一目标所需的经济价值。而不是依赖于记录的实际音景，我们将使用一种新的方法，结合鸟类监测数据与现有的记录个别物种，以构建模拟的自然音景在英国各地，并将其声学特性与当地的栖息地和景观特征。使用实验室和在线实验，我们还将探索短期反应和长期影响的暴露于不同的声学特性的音景，研究驱动这些关系的强度变化的上下文和个人因素。我们将研究支撑这些关系的心理机制，并调查人类噪音是否会减少自然音景的好处。我们还将把声景特征的空间模式与心理健康和抗抑郁药处方率的指标联系起来，并量化人们为改善自然声景质量而支付费用的意愿。总之，这些进展将使我们能够衡量，监测和预测自然声景观股票的时间和空间模式和衍生利益的流动。

There is growing recognition of the value and benefits of spending time in nature for human health and well-being, with governments and organisations around the world now developing green prescribing programmes to treat mental health issues and support mental well-being through contact with nature. The COVID-19 pandemic has served to highlight the value of such contact, both in terms of the detrimental impacts of local and national lockdowns on mental health and the widespread appreciation of the benefits of nature engagement during this period. The health and well-being benefits derived from nature represent globally important cultural ecosystem services (CES). However, whilst we know that the quantity of natural space available can influence these CES, the importance of the quality of this space remains largely unknown. We also have only a limited understanding of the role and impact that different elements of biodiversity play in driving nature-health relationships. These knowledge gaps have limited the systematic integration of these CES into wider ecosystem service frameworks, conservation and sustainable development policies, and landscape and urban green-space management.Sound plays a key role in our experience of nature, with bird song in particular providing the soundtrack to time spent outdoors. Indeed, from Vaughan William's "The Lark Ascending", to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", bird song has long been a defining component of our relationship with nature and our assessment of environmental quality. The acoustic characteristics of these soundtracks, or natural soundscapes, can be readily measured. Birds are frequently used as an indicator of wider biodiversity and the composition of bird communities is driven by many factors, such as habitat availability and landscape structure, that are also known to influence the quality of nature experiences. The acoustic characteristics of soundscapes provided by birds can therefore indicate the state of landscape biodiversity more generally. As such, soundscapes have the potential to provide an objective measure of the contribution of biodiversity to mental health and well-being benefits though nature engagement and to enable fuller integration of these CES into the ecosystem service framework and into natural capital policy and management decisions. In this project, our team of academic researchers and key stakeholders from conservation, mental health, industry, planning and policy arenas will develop the mechanistic understanding of the pathways linking landscape structure, soundscape complexity, perceptions of soundscape quality, derived mental health and well-being benefits, and economic values required to achieve this. Rather than relying on recordings of actual soundscapes, we will use a novel approach that combines bird monitoring data with existing recordings of individual species to construct simulated natural soundscapes across the UK and relate their acoustic properties to local habitat and landscape characteristics. Using both laboratory and online experiments, we will also explore short-term responses to and long-term implications of exposure to soundscapes with varying acoustic characteristics, examining the contextual and individual factors which drive variation in the strengths of these relationships. We will examine the psychological mechanisms that underpin these relationships and investigate whether human noise reduces the benefits of natural soundscapes. We will also relate spatial patterns in soundscape characteristics to indicators of mental well-being and antidepressant prescriptions rates, and quantify people's willingness to pay for improvements in natural soundscape quality. Taken together, these advances will allow us to measure, monitor and predict temporal and spatial patterns in natural soundscape stocks and the flows of derived benefits.