Think of your last memorable moment in nature. Did you spot a bird you’ve never seen before? Dip your toes in a river? Maybe climb a tree?

New research from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, recently published in the , examined whether children’s interactions with nature that are embodied, rather than just visual, are associated with being in the moment and feeling connected to something beyond the self.

Researchers coded responses from 127 Girl Scouts, ages 8-11, about a recent meaningful nature experience. A questionnaire then assessed the degree to which participants experienced presence in nature, the study’s term for being in the moment. Exploratory analyses found that participants who had embodied interactions reported a greater sense of presence in nature than those who reported only visual interactions.��

, co-author of the study and doctoral student of psychology at the UW, talked with UW News about the study.

Can you explain the difference between embodied and visual interactions with nature?

Carly Gray: We think of embodied nature interactions as engaging senses other than just vision. One’s whole body is often involved. Whether you’re moving or being still, you’re experiencing nature through more than just your eyes. A visual nature interaction is one that just uses the sense of vision — maybe watching a bird through a window or looking at the textures in a leaf.

To identify visual and embodied interactions in the study, we applied what we call an interaction pattern approach, which is a way of characterizing the how humans interact with nature. A relatively abstract interaction pattern could be something like “listening to animals.” That interaction pattern could encompass more specific interactions ranging from “hearing your neighbor’s dog bark” to “hearing birdsong in a forest.”

That leads us to the idea of presence. How do you use that term in the context of this study, and how does it tie in with the other ideas you were discussing?��

CG: We think of presence as a meaningful experience with optimal awareness and some sense of connection beyond the self — whether that’s the natural environment that one is in, some higher power, other people you’re with, or something else. It’s frankly difficult to put into words, which I think speaks to some of the power of what these experiences can feel like. In this study, we were looking specifically at presence in nature.

How did you then quantify this information?

CG: We developed questions based on existing measures and created some questions of our own. We used these questions to ask the Girl Scouts about their experience of presence in nature during the experiences they had just written about.

We asked the Girl Scouts to write about a meaningful nature experience and tell us where they were, what they were doing and why the experience was meaningful. We combed through these written narratives to identify interaction patterns and developed a coding manual to describe how to do this in a standardized way. After reading through half of these nature experiences, we looked at the interaction patterns and noticed that a lot of them were relying on vision. Primarily, we noticed a lot of verbs like seeing, watching, looking, staring. For example, a visual nature interaction would be “looking at a tall tree.”

We wanted to know what might be different between the Girl Scouts who reported solely visual experiences versus more embodied nature experiences. The Girl Scouts who engaged in nature using more action-oriented verbs — talking, listening, smelling, feeling — engaged in embodied nature interactions. For example, “building a snowman” and “hiking on a trail” came up in a few participants’ narratives. We considered these embodied nature interactions. Some of my other favorite examples were “talking to chickens,” “jumping in puddles,” and “throwing snowballs.”

Based on their interaction patterns, some Girl Scouts were categorized as having only had visual experiences. If a Girl Scout wrote about at least one interaction that used a non-visual verb, they were categorized as having had an embodied experience. We compared these two groups, embodied and only visual, based on their numeric scores on our measure of presence in nature and found that the Girl Scouts who reported embodied nature interactions also reported a stronger sense of presence in nature.

What are some potential practical implications of this research?

CG: I think this is a promising first step into understanding what it might mean to have a meaningful experience in nature, especially among young children. In this paper, we wrote specifically about applications to environmental education. For example, children can be encouraged to smell nature by finding nature items that smell good to them, like pinecones or flowers, and bringing those back to the classroom for an age-appropriate ecology lesson. A writing lesson could begin with students listening to nature with their eyes closed and then writing a creative short story about what they imagined they heard. We expect these embodied educational activities might foster a greater connection to nature and a sense of meaning through experiences of presence in nature.

We conducted this study with 8-to-11-year-old Girl Scouts, but I think it could have implications for educating young people of all ages. In my teaching, I’m a big fan of getting whole bodies involved in the learning process. So, I think this idea of embodied versus visual interactions with nature could be applied all the way from preschoolers to through college students.

Embodied nature interactions don’t need to be limited to educational settings, either. This idea of embodied versus visual nature interactions can be a helpful framework for parents and families to think about meaningful ways to spend time interacting with nature with their children. This Earth Day, consider how you can go beyond looking at spring flowers to engage with nature in more fully embodied ways.

Other co-authors were , UW professor of psychology and of environmental and forest sciences; , UW professor of environmental and forest sciences; , associate professor of pediatrics in the UW School of Medicine; , UW associate professor of environmental and forest sciences; , lead public health research scientist at ICF, who earned her doctorate in environmental and forest sciences at the UW; and of the Girl Scouts of Western Washington.

The study was funded by the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

For more information, contact Carly Gray at cgray19@uw.edu.

Lawler’s research centers on how climate change can drive shifts in plant and animal distributions, and the impacts those shifts have at both the species and ecosystem level. He also studies how climate change affects people, and the ways in which human health, climate and the environment are connected.

In addition to his research and teaching, Lawler leads the , a member organization of UW EarthLab. The initiative seeks to understand the benefits of nature contact to human health and well-being, and translate that understanding into programs, practices and policies that benefit all people.

“Coming from the largest professional scientific organization in the ecological sciences, this is a particularly meaningful recognition from his scientific peers of Josh’s leadership,” said , professor and director of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “His work and that of his students and partners has made a big impact on advancing our understanding of climate change impacts on biodiversity, and his leadership of the Nature and Health network at UW serves as an important bridge between science and society.”

According to the Ecological Society of America’s March 25 , the organization elected Lawler for “broadening understanding of the effects of landscape and climate change on biological diversity; for educating students and serving society in ways that have increased recognition of ecological science and the connection between nature and human health; and for mentoring the next generation of ecologists.”

Lawler received his Ph.D. from Utah State University and has been a professor at the UW since 2007. Before that, he held positions at Oregon State University, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and University of Maine.

All plants and animals need suitable conditions to survive. That means a certain amount of light, a tolerable temperature range, and access to sources of food, water and shelter.

Many of the existing efforts to protect plant and animal species across the United States rely on information about where these species currently live. For example, if a rare bird species such as the snowy plover is found in a specific location along the Washington coast, conservationists try to protect it from human development where it lives.

But as climate change disrupts the status quo, most animals and plants will need to move to cooler or otherwise more suitable environments to survive. How does this affect efforts to protect biodiversity?

A new study by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and The Evergreen State College analyzes whether accounting for climate change in conservation planning can protect future biodiversity more effectively than current approaches, and what the costs of implementing these solutions might be. The authors found that many species of animals and plants likely will need to migrate under climate change, and that conservation efforts will also need to shift to be effective. The published Jan. 27 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“We are going to need to protect different places if we want to protect biodiversity in the future,” said lead author , a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “We need to think about where species will go as the climate changes, and then plan for that. The business-as-usual planning process isn’t going to work.”

The research team looked at 1,460 different species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians across the continental U.S., considering whether current and potential future protected habitats are suitable for each species.

The team found that unless climate change impacts are considered explicitly, 14% of the species would not have a viable place to live under climate change. This is because current protections focus on where species are today, not where they will need to be in the future as temperatures warm.

“Our findings show that species are going to shift around, and we are going to have to put some of our conservation efforts in different places — and that will come at a cost,” Lawler said.

For the past two decades, researchers have been trying to figure out how conservation planning can account for species moving under climate change. This research team considered three proposed suggestions for how to accomplish this, analyzing the potential costs and effectiveness associated with implementing each one.

With climate change advancing, there’s an urgent need to devise plans — and implement them by protecting important landscapes, the researchers said.

“Climate change effects that were originally projected to be decades in the future are starting to become apparent in the present day. This is not an abstract concept anymore,” said co-author , a professor at Evergreen. “We need to take action as soon as possible, thinking about where species may need to go under climate change, and providing corridors through which they can move.”

The researchers first looked at costs and efforts associated with selecting specific plants and animals, then protecting land where they are now and where they will likely need to live in the future. Modeling this information for species such as the Townsend’s chipmunk, western rattlesnake and yellow-billed magpie, they found it would cost about 60% more than solely protecting their current habitats.

Then they looked at more general approaches, considering costs to protect landscapes with rare or disappearing climatic conditions that are likely to provide refuge for rare species as the climate changes. Many of these sites are at higher elevations, such as alpine meadows. They also factored in “climate corridors” that would potentially allow species to move safely to new locations.

Protecting these sites won’t cost much more, the authors found, likely because many of the landscapes identified as important under climate change are already located in protected national parks, wilderness areas, fish and wildfire refuges and private conservation areas from land trusts.

“It was encouraging to see that there were some climate-based solutions that didn’t increase the cost substantially,” said co-author , a UW research scientist in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

The authors hope this analysis will be helpful for land trusts to determine which areas should be considered high priority for conservation. While their study highlights parts of the country that will need more conservation attention under climate change, they caution that the paper isn’t intended to help pinpoint specific new parks to protect.

“This paper is pointing out that we might be missing opportunities or places where conservation is going to be needed in the face of climate change,” Withey said. “Another hope is that we can start capturing places that would protect species and would allow species to move without increasing our costs too much.”

Co-authors are , a former UW doctoral student now at Yale; Christopher Randels, a UW undergraduate student; and , lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

This research was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Wilburforce Foundation.

For more information, contact Lawler at jlawler@uw.edu, Withey at witheyj@evergreen.edu and Michalak at michalaj@uw.edu.

But there are still many questions about how time in nature can help with these health conditions, and others. A new ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý initiative announced this week seeks to advance research on these questions, connecting academic researchers with pediatricians, childcare providers, mental health practitioners and others who work with various populations on critical health issues.

“The initiative is aimed at accelerating our understanding of the health impacts of time spent in nature,” said , the initiative’s lead and a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “The group is not only about doing this critical research, but also about applying it to create programs and policies that are good for human health.”

Seattle-based REI Co-op $1 million to help launch the initiative at the UW. The new endeavor is part of , a university-wide institute that seeks to connect scholars with community partners to address our most difficult environmental challenges.

“The best researchers in the world are proving the case that getting outside is critical to our mental and our physical well-being,” said REI CEO Jerry Stritzke. “It’s time to rethink time outdoors as a must-have, not a nice-to-have.”

Nature for Health will focus its efforts on research that examines nature’s effects on health across five populations: veterans, children, older adults, health care providers and underserved populations. Researchers from across academic disciplines will partner with experts outside the university to conduct studies and projects that are most pressing to these key groups.

For example, , a UW assistant professor of environmental and forest sciences, is working with veterans groups to look at the effect of outdoor activities on treating symptoms of PTSD and depression. , a UW assistant professor of pediatrics and a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, is working with outdoor preschools to better understand the benefits of kids spending time outside.

“Some of the conditions that nature can help improve are fairly widespread and are expensive to treat, whether that’s depression, mental illnesses or physical illnesses,” Lawler said. “We know there are benefits from nature, but we need to know more about those benefits to produce better treatment.”

About two and a half years ago, Lawler and UW public health professor emeritus convened a small group of professors and community members with expertise in the outdoors industry, pediatric health and environmental nonprofits to talk about the health benefits of nature. That group quickly expanded to a network of more than 120 people with interest and expertise in many facets of nature and health, including outdoor preschool directors and teachers, psychologists, outdoor therapists, and planners from city, county and state offices.

Members of the group published a last year that summarized existing research on the health impacts of time spent in nature. This paper served as the backbone for the formation of the new Nature for Health initiative, leaders said.

“We are bringing UW expertise to bear on real issues that practitioners are grappling with. This will be multidisciplinary, applied research in partnership with others outside the university,” said , executive director of EarthLab. “Access to nature is also an issue of equity and justice which are core to EarthLab’s work. There are decisions made every day about access to nature and this initiative gives us a platform to connect more people across campus, and connect more decision-makers and users of this information on this issue. It has the potential to bring us together like few others.”

EarthLab’s Nature for Health will partner with the — a national group that is working to increase equitable access to nature though advocacy and programs — to collectively advance the evidence base for nature’s role in human health and well-being.

The new initiative will kick off with a daylong today at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House on the UW campus. This evening, Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” will deliver the second-annual at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Both events are hosted by EarthLab and co-sponsored by REI.

###

For more information, contact Lawler at jlawler@uw.edu and Packard at bwpack@uw.edu.

Scientists predict that as Earth warms and climate patterns morph in response, animals will be forced to move to survive. That usually means hightailing it to higher latitudes as equatorial areas become too hot and dry.

This movement pattern has happened fluidly and naturally in the past as climates have shifted, but now with human developments such as cities, highways and agriculture, critical animal migrations will be limited in surprising and troubling ways.

The ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and The Nature Conservancy have created an showing where mammals, birds and amphibians are projected to move in the Western Hemisphere in response to climate change. The visualization draws upon flow models from , taking inspiration from existing visualizations of wind flow across the U.S.

“This is the best visualization of any of these studies we’ve done. It’s much more compelling than our static maps,” said , a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and lead author of the study informing this animated map. “The flow diagram really makes the data much more accessible.”

In 2013 Lawler, along with , a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, then UW graduate student Aaron Ruesch and of the Conservancy, published a landmark in Ecology Letters that considered the likely movement patterns of nearly 3,000 species under climate change — determining which areas will be hot spots for animal migration in the coming decades and centuries.

In the U.S., they predict that the Appalachians will likely serve as a highway for species moving north. In the west, mountain ranges and protected areas will also serve as conduits, but many of the higher mountains will also serve as refuges themselves.

The researchers had created fixed maps showing species’ movement and patterns, but the data practically begged to be animated to visualize the full effect of the paper’s results, Lawler said. They asked data whiz with the Conservancy’s science team to produce an animation, and in mid-August launched.

The map is color-coded to depict separate movement patterns for mammals, birds and amphibians. The animations show a mass exodus toward northern regions, with empty black zones showing where large cities or landscape features like the Great Lakes block migration. It’s important to note that each dot and subsequent streaking line show the accumulation of species’ movement, not just one animal’s future migration, Lawler explained.

The researchers were surprised to see how clearly migration routes appeared once the data were visualized. They knew from the data that the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains were important movement areas, but once the data were animated on a map, those routes popped out like well-trodden paths, Lawler said.

“It was shocking to see these features emerge so clearly. You can really see them when the data are visualized like this,” he said.

In South America, the most striking pattern is a projected movement of species west out of the Amazon, Lawler added.

The researchers plan to calculate migration shifts for species in the U.S., particularly in the western regions, at finer resolutions, then apply that information to find the places most important to protect for movement under climate change. They also hope to visualize that data.

Read more about Migrations in Motion on the Conservancy’s , and see related stories in , The Atlantic’s and .

###

For more information, contact Lawler at jlawler@uw.edu or McRae at bmcrae@tnc.org.

Western areas of the U.S. provide greater temperature ranges and fewer human interruptions than eastern landscapes, allowing plants and animals there to move toward more hospitable climates with fewer obstacles. A new study has found that only 2 percent of the eastern U.S. provides the kind of climate connectivity required by species that will likely need to migrate, compared to 51 percent of the western U.S.

The , published June 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for the first time quantifies the concept of climate connectivity in the U.S. The paper suggests that creating climate-specific corridors between natural areas could improve that connectivity to as much as 65 percent nationwide, boosting the chances of survival by more species. The issue is especially critical in the Southeast, which could provide routes to cooler northern climates as temperatures rise.

“Species are going to have to move in response to climate change, and we can act to both facilitate movement and create an environment that will prevent loss of biodiversity without a lot of pain to ourselves,” said , a research scientist in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we really start to be strategic about planning to prevent biodiversity loss, we can help species adjust effectively to climate change.”

McGuire, a former postdoctoral researcher at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, focused on this project while working with co-author , a UW professor in the .

Creating and maintaining connections between natural areas has long been thought critical to allowing plants and animals to move in search of suitable climate conditions, McGuire explained. Some species will have to move hundreds of kilometers over the course of a half-century.

McGuire and her collaborators set out to determine the practicality of that kind of travel and test whether these human initiatives could improve migration to cooler areas. Using detailed maps of human impact created by David Theobald at Conservation Partners in Fort Collins, Colorado, they distinguished natural areas from areas disturbed by human activity across the United States. They then calculated the coolest temperatures that could be found by moving within neighboring natural areas.

Co-authors Tristan Nuñez from the University of California Berkeley, Lawler at the UW, Brad McRae from the Nature Conservancy and others created a program called . They then used this program to find the easiest pathways across climate gradients and human-disturbed regions to connect natural areas.

“A lot of these land areas are very fragmented and broken up,” McGuire said. “We studied what could happen if we were to provide additional connectivity that would allow species to move across the landscape through climate corridors. We asked how far they could actually go and what would be the coolest temperatures they could find.”

With its relatively dense human population and smaller mountains, the eastern part of the U.S. fell short on climate connectivity. The western part of the country – with its tall mountains, substantial undisturbed natural areas and strict conservation policies – provided much better climate connectivity.

“Many plants and animals will need to move in response to climate change. Our study highlights many areas, particularly in the eastern U.S., where those movements will likely be blocked by highways, cities, and agricultural fields,” Lawler said. “On a more positive note, the study also shows where wildlife corridors could be designated to significantly increase the ability of plants and animals to track suitable climates.”

Improving connectivity would require rehabilitating forests and planting natural habitats adjacent to interruptions such as large agricultural fields or other areas where natural foliage has been destroyed. It could also mean building natural overpasses that would allow animals to cross highways, helping them avoid collisions with vehicles.

Not only will animals have to move, but they’ll also need to track changes in the environment and food, such as specific prey for carnivores and the right plants for herbivores. Some birds and large animals may be able to make that adjustment, but many smaller creatures may struggle to track the food and climate they need.

“A lot of them are going to have a hard time,” said McGuire. “For plants and animals in the East, there is a higher potential for extinction due to an inability to adapt to climate change. We have a high diversity of amphibians and other species that are going to struggle.”

The negative impacts of climate change won’t affect all species equally, McGuire said. Species with small ranges or those with specialist diets or habitats will struggle the most.

“Not all plants and animals will have to move,” she explained. “There is a subset of them that will be able to hunker down where they are. There will be some species that are really widespread and will end up just having some population losses. But especially for species that have smaller ranges, there will be some loss of biodiversity as they are unable to jump across agricultural fields or major roadways.”

The Southeast, especially the coastal plains from Louisiana through Virginia, could create a bottleneck for species trying to move north away from rising temperatures and sea levels. “The Southeast ends up being a really important area for a lot of vertebrate species that we know are going to have to move into the Appalachian area and even potentially farther north,” she added.

In future work, the researchers hope to examine individual species to determine which ones are most likely to struggle with the changing climate, and which areas of the country are likely to be most impacted by conflicts between humans and relocating animals.

“We see a lot of species’ distributions really start to wink out after about 50 years, but it is tricky to look at future predictions because we will have a lot of habitat loss predicted using our models,” McGuire said. “Change is perpetual, but we are going to have to scramble to prepare for this.”

The research was supported by the U.S. National Park Service and by the Packard Foundation.

###

For more information, contact Lawler at jlawler@uw.edu or McGuire��at��jmcguire@biology.gatech.edu.

This was adapted from a Georgia Tech .

In a in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers have used new high-performance computing methods and comprehensive data on the distribution of thousands of species to map the threat that climate change poses to birds, mammals and amphibians across the Western Hemisphere. They found that although Arctic areas have experienced the most rapid warming to date, climate-related threats to the Amazon basin’s biodiversity will eclipse those in other regions by the year 2100.

“These results suggest that tropical species will likely be some of the most vulnerable to climate change,” said co-author , a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor of environmental and forest sciences. “While we know that many of these species are restricted to relatively narrow climatic ranges, combining this information with detailed maps of where and how climate is shifting most rapidly provides a much clearer picture of where threats are greatest.”

The researchers used high-performance computers to search for and categorize millions of images, approaches similar to those used in facial or fingerprint recognition software. This allowed them to sift through millions of pixels representing future climate at different locations to find locations that matched each site’s current climate fingerprint.

Researchers could then estimate the actual distance and speed it would take for an animal to disperse across the landscape to stay within its climate tolerances and survive in the face of climate change.

For example, the Amazon’s is projected to have to move several hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, because most of its range will likely become unsuitable for this species to live. Several other amphibian species in this region show similar movement patterns.

By incorporating data on the climate tolerances of individual species, the researchers were able to fine-tune their initial estimates of dispersal based on climate change alone. This combination of climate data and biological data showed that although polar regions currently are experiencing the greatest shifts in climate, species in the Amazon basin face the greatest threats because of the narrow range of conditions they can tolerate and the longer distance to cooler habitat that can serve as climate refuges.

As climate shifts over the coming decades, such “velocity of climate change” information can help predict which species are likely to adapt in place to new climatic conditions, disperse and establish in areas with newly suitable climate, or face the prospect of extinction.

Previous studies based velocity estimates only on climate measurements in the neighborhood of a site, rather than searching for matches across large areas, so they are less meaningful for animals that can disperse over longer distances.

“This study is the first time that scientists have been able to accurately estimate the velocity of climate change for thousands of species over entire continents,” said lead author , an ecologist with the in Orleans, California. “Even as governments step up their commitment to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, this information can help planners identify climate refuges where conservation would reduce loss of species from the climate change that is already locked into the system from past emissions.”

Other co-authors are David Roberts and Andreas Hamann of University of Alberta. The work was funded by the .

This study is part of the , a high-resolution database that maps climate change-related threats to biodiversity across North America. The database is used by conservation organizations such as the Wilderness Society and agencies such as the U.S. National Park Service to assess climate change vulnerability in different regions of the U.S. and Canada.

###

For more information, contact Carroll at 530-628-3512 or carlos@klamathconservation.org and Lawler at 206-962-7092 or jlawler@uw.edu.

This was adapted from a Klamath Center for Conservation Research news release. about the project.