INTERACTIVE MAP BY CENSUS TRACT: Mapping America’s access to nature, neighborhood by neighborhood
Quantifying nature reveals unsettling truths — about how the densest neighborhoods are often bereft of nature, and about how the poorest city dwellers have the least access to the nature’s health benefits. But it could also help pinpoint which parts of our urban landscapes would benefit most from an infusion of nature.
CLIMATE LAB
Mapping America’s access to nature, neighborhood by neighborhood
A city is a science experiment. What happens when we separate human beings from the environment in which they evolved? Can people be healthy without nature? The results have beenbleak. Countless studies have shown that people who spend less time in nature die younger and suffer higher rates of mental and physical ailments.
“There’s a really, really strong case for proximity to nature influencing health in a really big way,” said Jared Hanley, the co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, an Oregon start-up whose mission is to discover what kind of nature best supports human health, map where it is and persuade people to spend more time in it.
Using satellite imagery and data on dozens of factors — including air and noise pollution, park space, open water and tree canopy — NatureQuant has distilled the elements of health-supporting nature into a single variable called NatureScore.
Aggregated to the level of Census tracts — roughly the size of a neighborhood — the data provide a high-resolution image of where nature is abundant and where it is lacking across the United States.
A city is a science experiment. What happens when we separate human beings from the environment in which they evolved? Can people be healthy without nature? The results have beenbleak.
Countless studies have shown that people who spend less time in nature die younger and suffer higher rates of mental and physical ailments.
“There’s a really, really strong case for proximity to nature influencing health in a really big way,”said Jared Hanley, the co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, an Oregon start-up whose mission is to discover what kind of nature best supports human health, map where it is and persuade people to spend more time in it.
Using satellite imagery and data on dozens of factors — including air and noise pollution, park space, open water and tree canopy — NatureQuant has distilled the elements of health-supporting nature into a single variable called NatureScore.
Aggregated to the level of Census tracts — roughly the size of a neighborhood — the data provide a high-resolution image of where nature is abundant and where it is lacking across the United States.
Search the map
See your exposure to health-supporting nature
Hover on the map to explore the data
Enter a city
Here's one except:
In rural America, it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, Black or White, dropped out of high school or have a PhD: you are still likely to have access to health-supporting nature.
But in cities, differences in access to nature are as stark as other forms of inequality.
For example, among the fifth of Census tracts with the lowest levels of education, the average NatureScore is just 37, compared with an average score of 68 in the most educated Census tracts. The Census tracts with the lowest share of White people have an average NatureScore of 45, compared with 73 in the tracts with highest share of Whites.
How NatureScore relates to socioeconomic variables in urban Census tracts
Density
People per square mile
Education
Percent with at least high school diploma
Race
Percent White
Earnings
Median income ($)
Note: Urban tracts are defined as those with at least 1,000 people per square mile.
NatureScores can identify neighborhoods that need trees. Planting them is another matter. “We use [the data] as a starting point. But, you know, the devil is in the details,” said Christina Smith, the executive director of Groundwork Bridgeport, an environmental nonprofit in Bridgeport, Conn., where she grew up. Suppose you want to boost a neighborhood’s NatureScore by lining the sidewalk with trees. Before you buy the first sapling, you need to make sure the sidewalk is wide enough to fit a tree and still comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. And you’ll need money to hire workers or face the dangerous prospect of twenty high school volunteers packed into a narrow sidewalk with cars whizzing by. What about just giving free trees to neighborhood residents? If most people rent, they won’t have the authority to plant on their property.
If you manage to track down property owners, they might not want the burden of planting and caring for trees. . .
The NatureScores by Census tract were provided by NatureQuant, Inc., which described its methodology in this paper. Those data are as of July 31, 2023. You can find my analysis of those data along with 2020 socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census Bureau in this computational notebook. The top 500 U.S. cities were also provided by NatureQuant and are based on 2020 NatureScore data. You can find my analysis of the city data in this notebook.
You can use the code and data to produce your own analyses and charts — and to make sure mine are accurate. If you do, email me at harry.stevens@washpost.com.
Hover on the map to explore the data
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