Although the benefits of connecting with nature during daylight hours are well established, comparatively little is known about the psychological and behavioural outcomes of engaging with the natural world after dark. This talk presents a series of innovative studies that examine how nighttime nature experiences – focusing on moths, crane flies, and other invertebrates – may enhance connection to nature and the night sky, promote conservation-oriented behaviour, and support well-being. The research was conducted in collaboration with partners at Buglife and the Environmental Education Project at Rosliston Forestry Centre.
Participants were invited to take part in one of three nighttime events: Curious Crane Flies involved constructing environmentally friendly light traps to illuminate the often-overlooked beauty of crane flies; Buglife Safari used guided torchlight exploration to reveal the hidden lives of nocturnal invertebrates; and Nightwatch offered a broader range of evening activities – including bat walks, stargazing, and moth discovery sessions – designed to celebrate the wonders of nature after dark.
Across these studies, our findings indicate that relatively simple nighttime encounters can evoke curiosity, strengthen participants’ sense of connection with the natural world, enhance wellbeing and motivate greater engagement in its protection.
Q&A with Dr Chris Barnes
Dr Chris Barnes is a Chartered Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Derby. He is also a dark and quiet skies advocate, amateur astronomer, and member of the Nature Connectedness Research Group. Dr Barnes has published extensively in the field of nature connectedness and has a specialist interest in light pollution, and connection to the natural world at night.
How do you get children to overcome fears of being outside at night?
I didn’t actually encounter much fear amongst the children and teenagers I worked with towards being outside at night. That being said, I recognise that this is a problem and a barrier to engagement with nature in some situations. What worked really well in our Generation Green 2 project was that children/teenagers were going outside at night with pre-existing community groups that they already felt a part of, for example scouts, girl guides, or school trip groups. Having that existing feeling of safety and familiarity from being surrounded by people you already know definitely seems to help dampen the scarier parts of being outside at night. One other thing we did was provide dark-sky friendly torches to participants.
How can we reduce artificial lighting in urban areas when safety must also be considered?
That’s a big question, and it’s something that lots of people are working on across
various disciplines – urban planners, lighting professionals, psychologists like me,
entomologists, and so on. I recently attended the dark sky UK conference, and it was
inspiring to see the number of people involved in this issue. One of main points
emerging from discussions as far as I understand them is the emphasis on better
lighting, rather than no lighting. Maintaining and improve safety in urban areas is
essential, and streetlights play a crucial role in that, so in most cases we cannot
realistically remove lighting at a large scale. What we can do is improve the sort of
lighting we use – different wavelengths, timings of activation and stuff like that.
Is there a link between a country’s climate and its nature connectedness?
You may indeed have noticed what looks like a correlation between these two things in some of the data I shared towards the start of presentation. I would agree that there’s likely some degree of causal relationship here – we know weather is a strong predictor of whether somebody will want to go outside. We also know that seasonality and nature connectedness are strongly related – people connect much more with nature in the spring and summer than they do in the autumn and winter. This seasonal effect will be stronger in more seasonal, northern countries. That being true, I wouldn’t go so far as to say this was the sole driver of the observed pattern in nature connectedness between countries. Other factors such as work-life balance and cultural patterns will also be important.
In the Generation Green study, how did you control for the fact that residential students will have received more contact hours with nature than day-trippers?
We didn’t control for this – it’s just part of the nature of difference between the two study groups – but we did consider it as an explanation for observed differences in nature connectedness between groups. However, as I explained at the start of the presentation, the research evidence literature so far indicates that it is not the duration of engagement with nature that determines one’s nature connectedness, but rather the ‘level’ or ‘quality’ of connection. Indeed in our models, the duration of contact did not emerge as a variable of central importance.
Literature References
- Aggio et al. (2015) ‘Mothers’ perceived proximity to green space is associated with TV viewing time in children: the Growing Up in Scotland study’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743514004617
- Barnes and Passmore (2024) ‘Development and testing of the night sky connectedness index (NSCI)’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494423002463
- Boyes et al. (2021) ‘Street lighting has detrimental impacts on local insect populations’: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/531169/1/N531169JA.pdf
- Crawford et al. (2008) ‘Do features of public open spaces vary according to neighbourhood socio-economic status?’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829207001025
- Harvey et al. (2025) ‘Evaluation report for Generation Green 2. Assessing the impact of nature based short courses for young people’: https://derby-repository.worktribe.com/output/805966
- Hughes et al. (2018) ‘Evaluating connection to nature and the relationship with conservation behaviour in children’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1617138118300268
- Kyba et al. (2023) ‘Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022’: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781
- Price et al. (2022) ‘Factors associated with nature connectedness in school-aged children’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666622722000041
- Richardson et al. (2021) ‘Moments, not minutes: The nature-wellbeing relationship’: https://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow/article/view/1267
- Weimann et al. (2017) ‘Perception of safety is a prerequisite for the association between neighbourhood green qualities and physical activity: Results from a cross-sectional study in Sweden’: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829216303707
Further Info
- Royal Astronomical Society article – ‘Artificial light a ‘pollutant’ to humans, nature and astronomy’: https://www.ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/artificial-light-pollutant-humans-nature-and-astronomy
- Biodiversity Stripes: https://biodiversitystripes.info/global/
- BugLife information about light pollution: https://www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/light-pollution/
- British Ecological Society article – ‘Light pollution threatens moths, according to new study’: https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/light-pollution-threatens-moths-according-to-new-study/
- BugLife ‘Bug Gazing’ guidance: https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2023/06/Buglife-Nurture-the-Night-Shift-Bug-Gazing.pdf
- Chris Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drchristopherbarnes/
- BugLife: https://www.buglife.org.uk/
- DarkSky: https://darksky.org/
- Lost In The Glow (Trailer): https://lostintheglow.co.uk/
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