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Visitors’ perception of thermal comfort during extreme heat events at the Royal Botanic Garden Melbourne

  • Students and New Professionals 2015
  • Published:
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Abstract

Outdoor thermal comfort studies have mainly examined the perception of local residents, and there has been little work on how those conditions are perceived differently by tourists, especially tourists of diverse origins. This issue is important because it will improve the application of thermal indices in predicting the thermal perception of tourists. This study aims to compare the differences in thermal perception and preferences between local and overseas visitors to the Royal Botanic Garden (RBG) in Melbourne during summer. An 8-day survey was conducted in February 2014 at four sites in the garden (n = 2198), including 2 days with maximum temperature exceeding 40 °C. The survey results were compared with data from four weather stations adjacent to the survey locations. One survey location, ‘Fern Gully’, has a misting system and visitors perceived the Fern Gully to be cooler than other survey locations. As the apparent temperature exceeded 32.4 °C, visitors perceived the environment as being ‘warm’ or ‘hot’. At ‘hot’ conditions, 36.8 % of European visitors voted for no change to the thermal conditions, which is considerably higher than the response from Australian visitors (12.2 %) and Chinese visitors (7.5 %). Study results suggest that overseas tourists have different comfort perception and preferences compared to local Australians in hot weather based at least in part on expectations. Understanding the differences in visitors’ thermal perception is important to improve the garden design. It can also lead to better tour planning and marketing to potential visitors from different countries.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank for the support from the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, the Royal Botanic Garden (RBG) Victoria, as well as the volunteers from the RBG Victoria and Monash University for conducting the surveys. This study has approval from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee—project number CF13/3260 – 2013001699. It also obtained approval from the RBG Victoria with regard to conducting surveys with the visitors. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Additionally, the authors would like to thank Dr. Kate Cregan, the Graduate Researchers in Print (GRiP) group at Monash University, as well as Dr. Lynette Pretorious, Basil Cahusac de Caux, Cuong Hoang and Ricky Lau, for helpful discussions during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

    Cho Kwong Charlie Lam, Margaret Loughnan & Nigel Tapper

  2. Water for Liveability Centre, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

    Cho Kwong Charlie Lam, Margaret Loughnan & Nigel Tapper

  3. CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, Melbourne, Australia

    Cho Kwong Charlie Lam, Margaret Loughnan & Nigel Tapper

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  1. Cho Kwong Charlie Lam
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  2. Margaret Loughnan
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  3. Nigel Tapper
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Correspondence to Cho Kwong Charlie Lam.

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Lam, C.K.C., Loughnan, M. & Tapper, N. Visitors’ perception of thermal comfort during extreme heat events at the Royal Botanic Garden Melbourne. Int J Biometeorol 62, 97–112 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-015-1125-4

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