Exploiting big data to understand access to greenspace in the UK

Greenspaces provide valuable benefits to people; ecosystem services (ES). For example, there are over 62,000 urban greenspaces in GB, estimated to provide ES worth ~£130bn to those living nearby. These benefits can be broken down to different ES: e.g. food production (£114M per year), carbon sequestration (£33M), air filtration (£211M), cooling (£166M), noise mitigation (£14M), improved physical health (£4.4bn) and other cultural services (£2.1bn).

While much research is done on ES in general, they are usually treated as static, and the spatial process by which people access ES are poorly understood. For example, to receive these specific ES, people need to be able to access greenspaces within the urban landscape. On average, in GB there are 1.4 access points per hectare of functional greenspace, with the average urban property having 4.6 hectares of green space within a 200-meter radius. One may think that distance to greenspace is the main contributor to its usage. However, how people access nature at a landscape scale is currently not known.

This project will address this knowledge gap by combining theories from human mobility and behavioural ecology to understand the "movement ecology of people". Studies using smartphone data show that >50% of human movement is due to routine and that populations show hourly, daily and weekly movement patterns. Combined with behaviour ecology models (particularly foraging models, including: Marginal Value Theorem, Ideal Free Distribution, and Central Place Theory), we will consider how greenspaces are accessed via "human foraging" as people search the landscape for opportunities to benefit from nature. For example, as with other animals, humans may show complex "foraging" behaviour that simple distance metrics cannot capture. This will provide broader insights into how people access a range of ES, and develop a novel use of movement ecology ideas to the critical issue of ES.