Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Study finds lower asthma rates in children living in neighborhoods dominated by diverse locally adapted native plant communities vs. those living in area with nonnative plants or low plant diversity.
June 30, 2018
Excerpted from a June 12, 2018 press release from the U.S. Forest Service:
PORTLAND, Ore. A Forest Service study of nearly 50,000 children in New Zealand has found that those who live in greener neighborhoods are less likely to develop asthma. However, not all greenness is a good thing—children living in areas with nonnative plant species or low plant diversity were actually at a greater risk of developing the chronic lung disease.
The
study is the first to indicate that plant diversity can protect against a specific adverse health outcome and is published in the journal Nature Plants.
…
Their results suggested that greenness across a child’s life may help protect them from asthma and was associated with a 6% lower risk of developing the disease. Similarly, exposure to diverse natural vegetation across a child’s life also may help protect them from the disease, associated with a nearly 7% reduction in risk.
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The researchers found no evidence that reduced air pollution was associated with the protective effect.
Conversely, two nonnative land cover types—of the invasive plant gorse and exotic conifer species—were associated with a 3% and 4% higher risk, respectively, of developing the disease. Nonnative plants like these typically crowd out native species or are, in the case of exotic conifers, grown in monocultures in New Zealand, which are low in biodiversity. They also may generate pollen, which can serve as a respiratory irritant.
Asthma, a lung disease that causes a person’s airways to swell, making breathing difficult, affects about 25 million Americans, or 1 in 13 people, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 8 percent of U.S. children suffer from asthma, for whom it is the leading chronic disease.
So what do the findings of this study mean for children in the United States?
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“We tested it in New Zealand for pragmatic reasons because of the data availability there, but we believe that, despite some inevitable local differences, our results would likely hold in the United States.”
The Pacific Northwest Research Station—headquartered in Portland, Ore.—generates and communicates scientific knowledge that helps people make informed choices about natural resources and the environment. The station has 11 laboratories and centers located in Alaska, Washington, and Oregon and about 300 employees. Learn more online at
https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw.
