In cases where the carrying distance is short , simply using the EL should provide an effective means for reducing the risk of LBD during bucket handling. The results of the manual handling of buckets during this study agree with the findings reported by Allread et al. , who showed the LBD risk for youth handling buckets ranged between 29 and 70% depending on the task and material handled . That study highlighted the need to develop interventions to address jobs that place youth on farms at increased risk of LBDs, including bucket handling. The proper deployment of the two interventions introduced in this current study is expected to provide sizeable LBD risk abatement for youth who commonly handle buckets on farms. Although the study showed the potential benefits of the EBC and EL in bucket handling tasks, the results produced relatively conservative intervention evaluations because of the limitations inherent in the design of the experiment, including the age and limited working experience of the subjects. The study included only 16 and 17 years old high school students and younger adult college students who were not experienced bucket handlers working on farms. This may limit the implications of the study results; however, it is also important to note that the participants were neither experienced with the use of the newly introduced interventions; therefore, the relative comparison among the methods should hold. The study focused on the risk of LBD during handling of buckets and did not consider the effects of manual handling or the two interventions on other joints of the body such as the hands/wrist or shoulders. However, rolling greenhouse benches the design criteria for the interventions attempted to consider the effects of these tools on the wrists and shoulder by properly designing the handles and adjusting the devices in accordance to the user’s anthropometry.
Further study should confirm whether these new tools may create new risks to other joints of the body, beyond of what is expected during manual handling. Furthermore, this study focused primarily on the physical risk factors contribution to LBD risk during handling of buckets. Factors such as physical immaturity, growth, and psychosocial factors among youth users might be possible sources of variations in injury risks and patterns. Lastly, improvements and redesign of the EBC and EL are needed so that they may become available to the general public and bring the expected benefits to their users. Considerable resources are spent on sundry health promotion strategies ranging from special diets to social networks to communing with nature to wrist-monitored step counts. But which core interventions are most effective and will produce meaningful health benefits? The evidence supporting much health advice is correlational and piecemeal; the field could benefit greatly from the rigorous research methods and theories of experimental health psychology. This article investigates community gardening for health promotion and presents some of the first well-controlled experimental research conducted on the topic. Community gardening is the practice of group cultivation of fruits, vegetables, and/or ornamental plants; it is widely used in a variety of settings but lacks empirical evidence of when, why, and for whom it promotes health. Community gardening is an especially promising platform to study real-world pathways to health and well-being because it is a deeply rooted, multifaceted intervention that has the potential to slowly shift people onto a healthy trajectory. Community gardening requires persistence, planning, accountability, physical activity, and cooperation with others.
There is significant theoretical and empirical reason to expect that each of these elements may lead to new, healthier psychosocial patterns. That is, in addition to harvesting the direct benefits of garden labor—fresh produce, exercise, and a close-to-nature scene—gardening may reinforce productive patterns in other areas of life. Research on gardening and health is usefully categorized into five general domains: diet, education, environmental stewardship, social competence, and psychological well-being . First, with regard to diet, gardening can lead to increased vegetable intake . Relatedly, gardeners have a lower average body mass index than non-gardeners —perhaps because of the combination of a healthy diet and physical activity that gardening reportedly promotes . Second, regarding education and cognitive development, school gardens show promise for engaging students in academics and improving test scores, especially in science-based subjects . By teaching biology, math, or even history using hands-on examples in the garden—a setting where students can move and interact— teachers may encourage deeper learning than in a traditional classroom. Third, many school garden programs have a focus on the environment, which fosters ethical and political interest in protecting the earth . Fourth, various social benefits of community gardens have been documented: gardens may facilitate social capital , collective efficacy , and social support . In other words, gardens can strengthen the local social fabric. Finally, gardens may enhance individual psychological well-being . Gardeners report that gardens promote relaxation, creativity, and restoration , and gardeners have been shown to score higher in eudaimonic well-being and quality of life than non-gardeners . One of the few true experiments on the effects of gardening found that after a stressful task, a gardening group exhibited reduced cortisol levels and reported improved mood above and beyond a reading control group .
Much of this research, however, is correlational, weakly controlled, or narrowly targeted. For example, most gardening studies to date lack random assignment, thus undermining confidence that observed effects are due to gardening rather than preexisting differences, self-selection, varying situations, or other confounds and artifacts. Second, many studies do not include baseline measurements, thus limiting the precision of assessment. Third, typically only the immediate effects of gardening are measured, overlooking possible long-lasting, fundamental shifts that might change a lifestyle and thus have a more meaningful impact on wellness. In short, there is a need for true experiments of gardening that comprehensively measure lasting effects. Perhaps the most complex and challenging limitation in the extant literature on gardening is the dearth of adequate comparison groups—a key to in-depth understanding of the effects of gardening. Many studies focused on dietary impacts of school gardens have properly used nutrition education as a control group, but there is a remarkable lack of adequate comparison groups in studies of effects beyond school gardens and diet. Including proper control groups is critical to understanding causal pathways— what it is about gardening that might drive the beneficial effects. Are the effects due to being active? Being outdoors? Growing something? Simply participating in a supervised activity? Such deeper understanding is necessary both for refining the psychology of health promotion and for designing effective interventions.Impervious land cover, habitat degradation and modification, and fragmentation spur biodiversity loss within urban areas . Yet, depending on local or landscape characteristics, urban habitats may support taxonomically and functionally rich communities of arthropods and associated ecosystem services. The relative importance of local and landscape drivers of urban biodiversity varies for different organisms, such as arthropods. At the local habitat scale, arthropod abundance and species richness increase with plant richness and woody plant presence. At the landscape scale, natural vegetation cover enhances arthropod abundance and species richness. In contrast, impervious surface negatively affects arthropods, including pollinators and natural enemies. Species life history and functional traits—phenotypes that affect ecosystem processes—can also determine how local and landscape scale changes in urban environments drive community formation. Feeding habits, habitat preference, body size, commercial drying racks and dispersal ability are traits that may be vary in sensitivity to local and landscape factors. For example, changes in leaf litter differentially affect cavity and ground-nesting bees. Increases in impervious cover more strongly affect light-preferring than xerophilous spiders, and negatively impact spiders with high dispersal ability . Thus, landscape-scale urbanization and local habitat management can selectively filter for certain traits, thereby structuring urban communities. Changes in both taxonomic and functional richness and the traits of individuals within communities are important to monitor because arthropods provide ecosystem services. Thus, understanding to what extent local and landscape factors affect arthropods informs both conservation and function. Beetles are abundant, diverse, and play important roles in urban ecosystems, but carabid diversity and community composition vary along urban to rural gradients and carabid functional traits vary with local and landscape factors. Beetles are natural enemies, detritivores, and bio-indicators of ecosystem-level processes. In particular, ground beetles are sensitive to environmental changes, taxonomically and functionally diverse, easy to sample, and are often used in ecological research. Carabids respond to changes in landscape forest cover and to local agroecosystem management, such as hedgerow or field margin planting.
As carabids might positively respond to intermediate levels of urbanization, urban ecosystems may conserve relatively high species diversity when compared to more natural habitats. Carabid traits and landscape connectivity and quality influence the dispersal and distribution of carabids , influencing habitat colonization across urbanization gradients. Individual carabid species have three types of wing development and dispersal ability: monomorphic brachypterous ; monomorphic macropterous ; and, dimorphic or polymorphic. High dispersal species are common in farms, prairies, and highly disturbed habitats, and low dispersal species are associated with older, less disturbed habitats. Smaller carabids may disperse farther, depending on wing morphology, and they are more abundant in areas with highly degraded, modified, and fragmented habitats. Yet, in agroecosystems, larger carabid species consume more prey and provide better pest control. Thus, environments with fewer large carabids may experience less pest control. An impervious surface may be an environmental filter of carabid functional traits, like body size, but less is known regarding how local management and landscape surroundings affect carabid activity, species richness, and functional traits in urban ecosystems. Urban agroecosystems provide an ideal system to examine the drivers of carabid taxonomic and functional diversity, community composition, and traits. Differences in urban habitat composition and structure influence carabid activity, diversity, and may result in changes in the abundance of beetles with certain traits . Although urbanization generally leads to biodiversity loss, it is important to determine what urban habitats, and which characteristics of those habitats, can support biodiversity conservation in the future. To this end, we compared activity density, species richness, functional group richness, and traits of carabids in urban community gardens that differ in local and landscape features. In order to determine how gardeners might promote carabid activity and taxonomic and functional richness for conservation purposes or to promote ecosystem services that are provided by carabids, we examined: Which local habitat and landscape features of urban, community gardens influence carabid activity density, species richness, and functional group richness? and, Which local habitat and landscape features of urban, community gardens influence carabid community and trait composition?We sampled carabids with pitfall traps for 72 h in each site monthly . The pitfall traps indicate carabid beetle activity density, not necessarily abundance. Pitfall traps were made of 12 oz. clear plastic tubs . We placed traps at the center of the 20 × 20 m plots in two rows of three traps, and separated each trap by 5 m. We buried traps flush to the soil level and filled traps with 200 mL of a saturated saline solution with a drop of unscented detergent to break the surface tension. We placed green plastic plates over each trap and elevated plates 7–8 cm above the ground with nails to limit the rainwater influx and to capture non-target taxa. Upon collection, we rinsed arthropods with water, separated them to order, and then stored insects in vials with 70% ethanol. Our sampling effort was unfortunately not as high as some other studies that examined carabids along urbanization gradients. We placed pitfall traps in active garden beds . Thus, we were unable to leave traps out for longer than 72 h or to get permission for putting traps more than three times during the summer growing season. KWW at the Essig Entomology Museum at the University of California, Berkeley , used published keys and descriptions and a comparison to authoritatively identified specimens in EMEC to identify the beetles. Nomenclature follows Lorenz . For each individual, we measured body length and grouped beetles into small and large size classes. We determined the flight wing morphology for each beetle by lifting the elytra under a dissecting microscope and noting wing state.