Link: https://www.lecturernews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=116389

Article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935123000063

Kyungpook National University announced that a research paper co-authored by Prof. Kangjae Lee of the Department of Convergence & Fusion System Engineering, Prof. Matthew Browning of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University, and Prof. Yoo Min Park of the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at East Carolina University, was published in January 2023 in Environmental Research, an international journal ranked in the top 10% of the JCR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES category.

Prof. Kangjae Lee, the lead and corresponding author of this study, designated South Korea as the research area and confirmed spatiotemporal non-stationarity in the relationship between green spaces and stress.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly highlighted the impact of green spaces on human mental health, such as stress, this study identified regional heterogeneity in the relationship between stress and green spaces from 2018 to 2021, accounting for both temporal shifts and spatial administrative boundaries (Si-Gun-Gu).

Distinguishing itself from previous research, this study categorized green spaces into three types—forests, grasslands, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)—and examined how these different types of vegetation related to perceived stress in South Korea before and after the pandemic.

The research team discovered that forest cover consistently maintained a negative correlation with perceived stress on a global scale. In contrast, grasslands and NDVI showed mixed associations with perceived stress at the global level.

The research team emphasized that these findings underscore the necessity for local governments to develop diverse urban greening strategies for health promotion that respond to specific sociodemographic and existing environmental conditions.