Rising levels of stress and mental ill-health have intensified interest in nature-based public health approaches, including green social prescribing and nature as medicine. However, it remains unclear whether different environmental qualities are associated with different aspects of visit experience, and how these experiences relate to perceived visit-related health benefits. This study examined direct associations of biodiversity, safety, accessibility and cleanliness problems with perceived visit-related health benefits, and indirect associations involving fresh air / peace and tranquillity and feeling closer to nature. Cross-sectional data from 19,814 adults in England who reported a recent visit to a green or natural space in the People and Nature Survey (PaNS) were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). In the direct-effects model, biodiversity, safety and accessibility were positively associated with perceived visit-related health benefits, whereas cleanliness problems showed a negative association. Most of these direct associations were substantially attenuated when the two visit experiences were included, and both experiences were positively associated with perceived benefits. The pathway model also revealed differentiated associations across experiences, with safety most closely associated with fresh air / peace and tranquillity, biodiversity with feeling closer to nature, and cleanliness problems showing a negative indirect association through fresh air / peace and tranquillity. By considering qualities of the setting alongside experiences during the visit, the findings highlight the value of a quality-experience-benefit perspective in which different environmental qualities may show different patterns of association with perceived visit-related health benefits through particular visit experiences. This perspective may help inform the selection and management of natural settings used in nature-based public-health approaches, particularly where specific visit experiences are intended to be supported.
Context plays a central role in soundscape perception within the ISO 12913 series framework. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how to identify operational, standardised proxy metrics for capturing ‘context’ in soundscape assessment and prediction. The study addresses this gap by deriving a set of visibility-based metrics from Isovist and Visibility Graph Analysis (VGA) and evaluating their effectiveness in a soundscape predictive model. An on-site soundscape data campaign was conducted in Bloomsbury, Central London., Isovist and VGA metrics were computed for each soundscape observation to obtain a high-resolution, geospatial soundscape dataset (N = 787). Key findings stand out: (1) Isovist and VGA metrics correlate strongly with pleasantness (PISO) but weakly with eventfulness (EISO); (2) four ‘visual-spatial’ clusters (ViSpID) are derived from the selected Isovist and VGA metrics: Highly connected streets, Moderately connected streets, Open spaces & poorly connected streets, and Enclosed spaces; and (3) a linear multilevel model predicting PISO that incorporates these clusters (ViSpID) with psychoacoustic predictors (R2 = 0.51) outperforms a psychoacoustics-only baseline model (R2 = 0.15). These findings demonstrate that Isovist and VGA metrics provide practical proxies for the structural visibility and spatial configuration dimensions of physical context and support a systematic and reproducible framework for integrating these effects into predictive modelling.
