Summertime Fun in the Sun
We are well into the summer months so discard those winter doldrums and get active! To help you get in the mood, we’ve assembled a variety of outdoorsy studies from around the world:
With the advent of digital cameras and camera phones, we have all become amateur photographers. Picturesque peaks and beautiful beaches can be captured with the press of a button, tagged, and shared with others instantly via social media. Researchers, like the ones in a recent PLOS ONE study, can now use this user-generated data—these geo-tagged photographs—to find striking vistas and examine how they correlate with environmental factors, such as soil carbon and farming. These researchers used photos of Cornwall, England, uploaded to Panaramio and plotted them on a map to see where users were taking pictures. Photographs that were clustered together indicated that the area was valued for its aesthetic or visual beauty. As you might think, most clusters were found in beaches and sparsely populated coastal towns. Their findings also suggest that agricultural areas were negatively correlated with aesthetic value.
When looking for your next vacation destination, find somewhere picturesque with clean water. In the US, researchers have studied the effect that water quality may have on recreational activities in the Puget Sound. To do so, they used data from the Washington State Parks to determine how many people entered, camped, or moored in the Puget Sound, starting from the late 1980s to the present day. They then plotted this against fluctuations in Enterococcus, a type of bacteria associated with urinary tract infections and meningitis, in the water. Their findings indicate that an increase of Enterococcus corresponded to a recorded decrease in visitation rates.
Feel like getting involved in the scientific process? You can spend your summer taking part in the citizen science movement and enjoy the great outdoors at the same time. Your contributions may help someone with their research! For example, take this recent PLOS ONE study that uses observational data collected by a Turkish ornithological society. The researchers took recorded sightings of 29 songbird species and combined it with climate data (rainfall and temperature) to develop a model predicting how songbirds may be affected by climate change. The model helped them predict the birds’ distribution in 2020, 2050, and 2080.
Fun can also be found closer to home. For those of you with little ones, there is research to indicate that children’s sedentary behavior can be reduced using a few simple methods. The researchers of this study suggest decreasing the amount of time parents watch TV on the weekend, and instead recommend participating in boys’ sports and encouraging girls to play outside. Their suggestions are based on data collected from participants’ accelerometers over the course of a year. Learn more about this study here.
Citations:
Casalegno S, Inger R, DeSilvey C, Gaston KJ (2013) Spatial Covariance between Aesthetic Value & Other Ecosystem Services. PLoS ONE 8(6): e68437. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068437
Kreitler J, Papenfus M, Byrd K, Labiosa W (2013) Interacting Coastal Based Ecosystem Services: Recreation and Water Quality in Puget Sound, WA. PLoS ONE 8(2): e56670. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056670
Abolafya M, Onmuş O, Şekercioğlu ÇH, Bilgin R (2013) Using Citizen Science Data to Model the Distributions of Common Songbirds of Turkey Under Different Global Climatic Change Scenarios. PLoS ONE 8(7): e68037. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068037
Atkin AJ, Corder K, Ekelund U, Wijndaele K, Griffin SJ, et al. (2013) Determinants of Change in Children’s Sedentary Time. PLoS ONE 8(6): e67627. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067627
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterococcus
Image: 99-Bar Harbor by Robert & Pam.