Practitioner Guide to Assessing Connection to Nature

Our goal in creating this guide is to provide practitioners, organizations, researchers, and others with a “one-stop shop” for measuring nature connections. The guide is for those interested in assessing and enhancing the connections their audiences have to nature; we use the term “audience” to refer broadly to your participants or to any group you are trying to assess. The guide can help you choose an appropriate tool (for example, a survey or activity) for your needs, whether you work with young children, teenagers, or adults (see the Decision Tree on p. 14). The guide also includes 11 tools and approaches that you can use to assess connection to nature. Since the way we think about nature and the types of relationships we develop with nature can be culturally determined, we also summarize where the tool has been used and report its validity with different audiences. For more information about how this guide was developed, see p. 58.