THE ROLE OF TEMPERATURE AND AIR QUALITY IN OUTDOOR RECREATION BEHAVIOR: A SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS APPROACH

ABSTRACT

Ambient air pollution and rising global temperatures pose dual threats to the health and well-being of urban residents, in part, through dissuading them from engaging in healthy, outdoor physical activity. We leveraged a social-ecological systems (SES) framework to explain weather-dependent, outdoor recreation in the wildland-urban interface of Salt Lake City, Utah. Using 24-hour trail camera monitoring for 32 days, we measured trail use and ambient temperature. Additionally, we accessed particulate matter (PM_2.5) and ozone (O₃) data to assess the impact of air quality on outdoor recreation behaviors. Curvilinear regression analysis illustrated temperature predicted 45.9 percent of the variance in outdoor recreation use, while bivariate analyses show particulate matter and ozone also served as substantial predictors. These results further parameterize components of this complex SES, and help demonstrate the utility of trail cameras in collecting localized thermal measurements, along with temporal and activity-specific distributions in use.

Keywords::

• temperature
• air quality
• trail cameras
• outdoor recreation
• wildland-urban interface

Acknowledgment

Thanks are due to Dr. Brian Peterson for his assistance in trail camera placement.

Notes

¹ MTMET data access is provided to researchers online at https://mesowest.utah.edu/cgi-bin/droman/download_api2.cgi?stn=MTMET&year1=2019&day1=14&month1=1&hour1=21&timetype=LOCAL&unit=1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sustainable Campus Initiative Fund of the University of Utah [2018].