Public greenspaces provide an opportunity for community members to engage with the outdoors. In many locations, however, parks are under used. In an effort to gauge the potential for outdoor interaction and ecosystem education, we conducted a survey of residents from a central New Jersey, USA, county. Our correlation analysis indicated that park use could be related to socioeconomics and in particular education, environmental literacy, pet ownership, outdoor enjoyment and preferred environment. Variables relating to mood and other personal characteristics were more strongly associated with individual identity characteristics. Through multivariate analyses, we offer an organizing framework that can help tailor outdoor greenspace improvement/restoration and programming to identity categories. These categories are a combination of where an individual lives, enjoyment of the outdoors, education and socio-economics, sense of community, institutional trust, and pet ownership.

Urban green spaces have long been studied in terms of their impact on human and environmental health and well-being. We collected and analyzed preliminary survey data for central New Jersey municipalities relating to participants' perceptions of public green spaces, quality, and usage and relating these factors to environmental knowledge and literacy. Results have yielded new insights into the role of urban canopy cover in differing levels of environmental literacy. Included in this, persons living in areas with higher canopy cover have higher levels of environmental literacy (p=0.0338) and higher educational attainment (p=0.049). Persons with access to higher quality parks also exhibited higher levels of educational attainment (p=0.0475). This relationship and others collectively would support there being multiple types of environmental literacy, with diverse sources, impacts, and outcomes on individuals and communities. Work done to this point has not addressed this idea, nor sought to study the connections between EL and all influencing socio-cultural and landscape factors.

Effective communication of science to the general public is important for numerous reasons, including support for policy, funding, informed public decision making, among others. Prior research has found that scientists participating in public policy and public communication must frame their communication efforts in order to connect with audiences. A frame is the mechanism that individuals use to understand and interpret the world around them. Framing can encourage specific interpretations and reference points for a particular issue or event; especially when meaning is negotiated between the media and public audiences. In this study, we looked at the effect of framing within an environmental conservation context. To do this we had survey respondents rank common issues, among them being environmental conservation, from most important to least important for the government to address. We framed environmental conservation using three synonymous terms (environmental security, ecosystem services, and environmental quality) to assess whether there was an effect on rankings dependent on how we framed environmental conservation. We also investigated the effect of individuals' personality characteristics (identity frame) on those environmental conservation rankings. We found that individuals who self-identified as environmentalist were positively associated with ranking highly (most important) environmental conservation when it was framed as either environmental quality or ecosystem services, but not when it was framed as environmental security. Conversely, those individuals who did not rank themselves highly as self-identified environmentalists were positively associated with environmental conservation when it was framed as environmental security. This research suggests that framing audience specific messages can engender audience support in hot-button issues such as environmental conservation and climate change.

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