Sponsor
US Forest Service under joint venture agreement 23-JV-11261956-011 and two Portland State University faculty development grants. Randy Bluffstone also acknowledges support from Vilnius University and a grant from the J. William Fulbright Program.
Published In
Forests
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-28-2025
Subjects
Forest canopies -- Research -- Methodology
Abstract
Evidence appears to be building that direct exposure to natural landscapes characterized by significant green cover, such as forests, can help to reduce chronic health conditions such as obesity, stress, hypertension, chronic cardiovascular conditions, depression, anxiety, cancer, and diabetes. One way to encourage greater exposure to nature may be through the use of nature prescriptions, whereby clinicians formally recommend (or prescribe) time in nature to their patients. Based on self-reported data, we describe the implementation and lessons learned from a pilot field experiment examining the clinical use of nature-based versus conventional exercise recommendations in rural Oregon. We discuss the potential benefits of such recommendations, as well as identify several challenges and opportunities associated with field experiments seeking to evaluate whether nature prescriptions, offered as one part of patients’ overall treatment plans, meaningfully improve human health outcomes in clinical settings. We conclude with several recommendations for practitioners and researchers interested in implementing and evaluating nature-based exercise programs to improve public health.
Rights
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Locate the Document
DOI
10.3390/f16050752
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43682
Publisher
MDPI AG
Citation Details
Bluffstone, R., Chan, M., Cox, C., Davis, M. M., Dickinson, C., Dissanayake, S. T. M., Kline, J. D., Carrera López, C., Ojha, H., Stokes, S., Thosar, S. S., & Vedantam, S. (2025). Evaluating Nature-Based Versus Generic Physical Activity Programs to Address Chronic Health Conditions: Lessons from an Oregon (USA) Pilot Study. Forests, 16(5), 752.