URBiNAT Scientific Partners Marcel Cardinali and Uta Pottgiesser from the Institute for Design Strategies at the OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Germany), are the co-authors of a newly published paper in connection with the URBiNAT project. The paper is published in the journal Environmental Research (Elsevier, ScienceDirect, 2023). 

– Guiding principles to ensure high-quality assessment in green space-health research.
– Providing a guided flow of assessment decisions and reporting guidance.
– Highlighting differences in green space feature assessment by theoretical pathway.
– Discussing different scales of context variables and their pathway-specific influence.

The relationship between green spaces and health is attracting more and more societal and research interest. The research field is however still suffering from its differing monodisciplinary origins. Now in a multidisciplinary environment on its way to a truly interdisciplinary field, there is a need for a common understanding, precision in green space indicators, and coherent assessment of the complexity of daily living environments.

In several reviews, common protocols and open-source scripts are considered a high priority to advance the field. Realizing these issues, we developed PRIGSHARE (Preferred Reporting Items in Greenspace Health Research).

It is accompanied by an open-source script that supports non-spatial disciplines in assessing greenness and green space on different scales and types.

The PRIGSHARE checklist contains 21 items that have been identified as a risk of bias and are necessary for understanding and comparison of studies. The checklist is divided into the following topics: objectives (3 items), scope (3 items), spatial assessment (7 items), vegetation assessment (4 items), and context assessment (4 items).

For each item, we include a pathway-specific (if relevant) rationale and explanation. The PRIGSHARE guiding principles should be helpful to support a high-quality assessment and synchronize the studies in the field while acknowledging the diversity of study designs.

Read the full paper HERE or click below to download.