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Much academic and media attention has been focused on how nature contributes to psychological health, yet, most of this focus has been on happiness or hedonic well-being. Although numerous writers and researchers have linked connecting with nature as a pathway to meaning in life, an integrated overview has not yet (to our knowledge) been offered. Our manuscript is thus of both theoretical and practical importance with respect to finding meaning in life. In this hybrid commentary/review paper, we examine the link between meaning in life and relating to the beyond-human natural world. Through presenting supportive empirical research and interdisciplinary insights, we make the case that connecting with the natural world provides us with meaning in various ways. We discuss how nature is a common source of meaning in people's lives and how connecting with nature helps to provide meaning by addressing our need to find coherence, significance/mattering, and purpose (the three aspects comprising the tripartite model of meaning life). We also consider how connecting with nature enhances our experiential appreciation for life, a fourth aspect of meaning in life recently proposed. Our discussion then expands to examining nature as a place of attachment. Going beyond how nature provides us with meaning, we consider how engaging in nature-based activities provides an avenue for many people to build meaningful lives. We close by considering how threats to nature are a threat to meaning in life.

The main objective of this 2-week RCT study was to test the efficacy of the previously developed Noticing Nature Intervention (NNI) to boost wellbeing during winter months. The NNI consists of noticing the everyday nature encountered in one's daily routine and making note of what emotions are evoked. Community adults ( N  = 65) were randomly assigned to engage in the NNI or were assigned to one of two control conditions. Paired t -tests revealed significant increases pre- to post-intervention in the NNI group for positive affect ( d  = 0.43), elevation ( d  = 0.59), nature connectedness ( d  = 0.46), and hope agency ( d  = 0.64), and a marginally significant increase in transcendent connectedness ( d  = 0.41). No significant pre-post difference emerged for any aspect of wellbeing in the control conditions. Analysis of qualitative findings revealed that negative emotion themes were 2.13 times more likely to be associated with built photos than with nature photos. Feelings of peace, awe, happiness, humbleness, and hope were more likely to be associated with nature photos, while feelings of annoyance, loneliness, curiosity, uncertainty, anger, yearning, and comfortableness were more likely to be associated with built photos. Overall, results indicated that engaging in the NNI can provide a wellbeing boost, even in the cold of winter. This study is the first (to our knowledge) to test any nature-based wellbeing intervention during colder, winter months, and to directly assess the impact of a nature-based wellbeing intervention on levels of hope., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Passmore, Yargeau and Blench.)

In a series of four studies ( N s = 245, 135, 155, 222), we explored the effects of viewing nature scenes on promoting recovery from ostracism. We first manipulated experiences of ostracism, then randomly assigned participants to view photos of either nature, urban scenes, or neutral objects. Across all four studies, participants who viewed nature photos reported significantly lower levels of state social pain, along with significantly higher levels of affect balance and self-esteem. Moreover, when asked to look back and recall how they felt at the time of being ostracized, participants who viewed nature photos reported significantly higher levels of retrospective satisfaction of basic emotional needs than did participants in control conditions. An internal meta-analysis revealed an effect size of d = 0.58. These studies are the first, to our knowledge, to provide experimental evidence of how exposure to nature can alleviate the pain of social ostracism.

Background: Increasingly colleges and universities are offering canine therapy to help students de-stress as a means of supporting students' emotional health and mental well-being. Despite the popularity of such programs, there remains a dearth of research attesting to their benefits., Aims: Participants included 1960 students at a mid-size western Canadian University. The study's aims were to assess the stress-reducing effects of a weekly drop-in, canine-therapy program and to identify how long participants spent with therapy canines to reduce their stress., Methods: Demographic information was gathered, length of visit documented and a visual analog scale (VAS) was used to assess entry and exit self-reports of stress., Results: Participants' self-reported stress levels were significantly lower after the canine therapy intervention. Participants spent an average of 35 min per session., Conclusions: This study supports the use of drop-in, canine therapy as a means of reducing university students' stress. The findings hold applied significance for both counseling and animal therapy practitioners regarding the dose intervention participants seek to reduce their stress.

We tested the effectiveness of Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching IV (FIRST), a professional development program for postdoctoral scholars, by conducting a study of program alumni. Faculty professional development programs are critical components of efforts to improve teaching and learning in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, but reliable evidence of the sustained impacts of these programs is lacking. We used a paired design in which we matched a FIRST alumnus employed in a tenure-track position with a non-FIRST faculty member at the same institution. The members of a pair taught courses that were of similar size and level. To determine whether teaching practices of FIRST participants were more learner-centered than those of non-FIRST faculty, we compared faculty perceptions of their teaching strategies, perceptions of environmental factors that influence teaching, and actual teaching practice. Non-FIRST and FIRST faculty reported similar perceptions of their teaching strategies and teaching environment. FIRST faculty reported using active learning and interactive engagement in lecture sessions more frequently compared with non-FIRST faculty. Ratings from external reviewers also documented that FIRST faculty taught class sessions that were learner-centered, contrasting with the teacher-centered class sessions of most non-FIRST faculty. Despite marked differences in teaching practice, FIRST and non-FIRST participants used assessments that targeted lower-level cognitive skills. Our study demonstrated the effectiveness of the FIRST program and the empirical utility of comparison groups, where groups are well matched and controlled for contextual variables (for example, departments), for evaluating the effectiveness of professional development for subsequent teaching practices.

The availability of reliable evidence for teaching practices after professional development is limited across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, making the identification of professional development "best practices" and effective models for change difficult. We aimed to determine the extent to which postdoctoral fellows (i.e., future biology faculty) believed in and implemented evidence-based pedagogies after completion of a 2-yr professional development program, Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST IV). Postdocs (PDs) attended a 2-yr training program during which they completed self-report assessments of their beliefs about teaching and gains in pedagogical knowledge and experience, and they provided copies of class assessments and video recordings of their teaching. The PDs reported greater use of learner-centered compared with teacher-centered strategies. These data were consistent with the results of expert reviews of teaching videos. The majority of PDs (86%) received video ratings that documented active engagement of students and implementation of learner-centered classrooms. Despite practice of higher-level cognition in class sessions, the items used by the PDs on their assessments of learning focused on lower-level cognitive skills. We attributed the high success of the FIRST IV program to our focus on inexperienced teachers, an iterative process of teaching practice and reflection, and development of and teaching a full course., (© 2015 D. Ebert-May et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2015 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).)

Background: The organization of networks of interacting species, such as plants and animals engaged in mutualisms, strongly influences the ecology and evolution of partner communities. Habitat fragmentation is a globally pervasive form of spatial heterogeneity that could profoundly impact the structure of mutualist networks. This is particularly true for biodiversity-rich tropical ecosystems, where the majority of plant species depend on mutualisms with animals and it is thought that changes in the structure of mutualist networks could lead to cascades of extinctions., Methodology/principal Findings: We evaluated effects of fragmentation on mutualistic networks by calculating metrics of network structure for ant-plant networks in continuous Amazonian forests with those in forest fragments. We hypothesized that networks in fragments would have fewer species and higher connectance, but equal nestedness and resilience compared to forest networks. Only one of the nine metrics we compared differed between continuous forest and forest fragments, indicating that networks were resistant to the biotic and abiotic changes that accompany fragmentation. This is partially the result of the loss of only specialist species with one connection that were lost in forest fragments., Conclusions/significance: We found that the networks of ant-plant mutualists in twenty-five year old fragments are similar to those in continuous forest, suggesting these interactions are resistant to the detrimental changes associated with habitat fragmentation, at least in landscapes that are a mosaic of fragments, regenerating forests, and pastures. However, ant-plant mutualistic networks may have several properties that may promote their persistence in fragmented landscapes. Proactive identification of key mutualist partners may be necessary to focus conservation efforts on the interactions that insure the integrity of network structure and the ecosystems services networks provide.

Ecological disturbances frequently control the occurrence and patterning of dominant plants in high-diversity communities like C(4) grasslands and savannas. In such ecosystems disturbance-related processes can have important implications for species, and for whole communities when those species are dominant, yet mechanistic understanding of such processes remains fragmentary. Multiple bunchgrass species commonly co-dominate disturbance-dependent and species-rich pine savannas, where small-scale fuel heterogeneity may influence bunchgrass survival and growth following fires. We quantified how fire in locally varying fuel loads influenced dynamics of dominant C(4) bunchgrasses in a species-rich pine savanna in southeastern Louisiana, USA. We focused on two congeneric, co-dominant species (Schizachyrium scoparium and S. tenerum) with similar growth forms, functional traits and reproductive strategies to highlight effects of fuel heterogeneity during fires. In experimental plots with either reduced or increased fuels versus controls with unmanipulated fuels, we compared: 1) bunchgrass damage and 2) mortality from fires; 3) subsequent growth and 4) flowering. Compared to controls, fire with increased fuels caused greater damage, mortality and subsequent flowering, but did not affect post-fire growth. Fire with reduced fuels had no effect on any of the four measures. The two species responded differently to fire with increased fuels--S. scoparium incurred measurably more damage and mortality than S. tenerum. Logistic regression indicated that the larger average size of S. tenerum tussocks made them resistant to more severe burning where fuels were increased. We speculate that locally increased fuel loading may be important in pine savannas for creating colonization sites because where fuels are light or moderate, dominant bunchgrasses persist through fires. Small-scale heterogeneity in fires, and differences in how species tolerate fire may together promote shared local dominance by different bunchgrasses.

Pyrogenic plants dominate many fire-prone ecosystems. Their prevalence suggests some advantage to their enhanced flammability, but researchers have had difficulty tying pyrogenicity to individual-level advantages. Based on our review, we propose that enhanced flammability in fire-prone ecosystems should protect the belowground organs and nearby propagules of certain individual plants during fires. We base this hypothesis on five points: (1) organs and propagules by which many fire-adapted plants survive fires are vulnerable to elevated soil temperatures during fires; (2) the degree to which burning plant fuels heat the soil depends mainly on residence times of fires and on fuel location relative to the soil; (3) fires and fire effects are locally heterogeneous, meaning that individual plants can affect local soil heating via their fuels; (4) how a plant burns can thus affect its fitness; and (5) in many cases, natural selection in fire-prone habitats should therefore favor plants that burn rapidly and retain fuels off the ground. We predict an advantage of enhanced flammability for plants whose fuels influence local fire characteristics and whose regenerative tissues or propagules are affected by local variation in fires. Our "pyrogenicity as protection" hypothesis has the potential to apply to a range of life histories. We discuss implications for ecological and evolutionary theory and suggest considerations for testing the hypothesis.