Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

First Advisor

Rachelle K. Gould

Second Advisor

Stephanie E. Hurley

Third Advisor

Laurie Kutner

Keywords

access, gender, income, outdoor, race, Vermont

Abstract

Experiencing nature can come in many different forms for various individuals. Whether gardening in a backyard or bushwhacking up a mountain, nature experiences have been determined to be beneficial to human health. Yet, literature shows that natural spaces are not equally accessible to all people. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, additional barriers emerged including the closures of some natural spaces, higher risk perceptions at some locations, and more. The aim of this research is to evaluate how Vermont residents described the types of natural spaces they visited during the COVID-19 pandemic and observe trends across three demographics: household income level, gender, and race. We find that the common ways that the survey respondents described these nature-based spaces were broken down into the themes of (1) ecological-based descriptions; ecological communities, ecosystems, and individual species, (2) infrastructure; lack of infrastructure, parks, private land, public land, roads, second homes, and trails and paths, natural features; (3) bodies of water and waterfalls, fields and meadows, mountains, and woods and forests, (4) social interactions; presence of people and lack of people. Across demographics, this research revealed the demographic differences and consistencies among people who reportedly frequented various types of natural places during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that across racial demographics, reported nature space visitation rates are relatively proportional to the racial demographics of the sample. In some nature spaces, we find higher proportions of low- and medium-income levels compared to high-incomes and higher proportions of women and non-binary individuals compared to men. Despite our findings contradicting previously studied demographic and natural space trends, they point to Vermont as a possible outlier, as well as the difficulties of studying demographic trends with a sample that is neither precisely representative of the target population nor diverse across all demographics.

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