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构成，由于人口密度高以及单一事件可能引发功能上相互依赖的物理，社会和经济领域的级联效应，城市特别容易受到COVID-19等流行病的影响。通过观察公园使用者的行为，这项研究关注了大流行期间，公园和其他自然和工程形式的绿色基础设施（GI）在费城和纽约市居民区中扮演的复杂和潜在的对立角色。公园的作用是复杂的，因为一方面，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复原力，这些过程可以建立信任、产生地方依恋、社会支持、归属感和赋权，另一方面，去公园可能会加速这种高度传染性疾病的传播，因为它会造成更多的人与人的接触，或将病毒传播到操场表面、长凳、扶手、自行车架或其他表面。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，但随着收容所感染率的上升和春季和夏季天气的改善，公园最终将成为寻求社交距离的无家可归者的避风港。由于全国缺乏COVID-19检测，对公园表面进行擦拭、采样和实验室检测被认为是不可能的。这项研究的重点是观察公园使用者的行为，并记录可能造成感染风险升高的使用模式。这一目标是通过实施一种新的方法来实现的，这种方法是通过付费的公民科学家来实现的，由数字技术来实现，旨在促进要研究的社区的经济弹性。这项工作将在一整年的时间里进行，包括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个战略性选择的公园中进行。将成立一个咨询小组，以帮助指导工作和解释结果。该研究将在前所未有的国际流行病背景下推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在这些领域拥有丰富的跨学科研究经验，并曾与两个城市的政府和非政府利益相关者合作。该研究将生成关于COVID-19传播时公共使用公园的新数据集，并将搜索这些观察结果与公园和社区特征之间的相关性。它还将评估失业的城市居民迅速成为重要的人类“传感器”的可行性，这些传感器在这两个大城市内收集重要的精细空间分辨率观测数据。该研究将产生与城市公园和自然资源管理者相关的结果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.