Hannah Williams

Access to green spaces in the outdoors is a key resource for human mental and physical wellbeing. Knox County has almost 300,000 acres of urban tree cover and other vegetation, with 64% of the land area in Knoxville being vegetation. Knoxville is a city known for its urban wilderness, with Ijams, Fort Dickerson, and several other large recreation areas just over the river from downtown, but who has access to these green spaces and where they are located throughout Knox County is not equitable across socioeconomic groups. Working with the Director of Environmental Studies, Professor Michael McKinney, master’s student in the agricultural and resource economics department, Williams has been using LiDAR data of Knox County vegetation to better understand who has access to urban green spaces in Knox County and where these green spaces are primarily located. Collecting US Census and TNDOE data by census tract and elementary school district in Knox County allowed Williams to look at the relationships between socioeconomic and health factors of Knox County residents and urban tree cover/vegetation in their area. This showed that by elementary school district in Knox County, the higher the urban tree cover in the district, the higher the student success rate is at the school. Furthermore, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school decreases as urban tree cover in the district increases. By census tract in Knox County, the rate of asthma is negatively correlated with urban tree cover, and tracts with a high median household income also have high urban tree cover. Once these relationships were established, Williams created maps of urban tree cover and the statistically significant variables in ArcGIS to better visualize the relationships between the variables and urban tree cover. Williams’s findings tell us that urban tree cover is not equally distributed among socioeconomic groups in Knox County and are among the first to document the luxury effect in a medium sized city. Moving forward, this study will be used to document and quantify social health benefits from urban green space and make policy recommendations for Knox County.