NatureScore and Urban Heat Indexes to understand the built world

What is NatureQuant?

NatureQuant is a technology and research company that builds tools to measure how much nature people are actually exposed to where they live, work, and move. Their flagship product, NatureScore, gives researchers, planners, and clinicians a consistent way to quantify the natural elements of any location on a 0 to 100 scale. The company has been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal for its work on environmental health measurement.

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What academic researchers should know about NatureQuant nature exposure data

NatureQuant publishes two U.S. datasets on Dewey: NatureScore and the NatureScore Urban Heat Index. NatureScore blends roughly 30 underlying inputs into a single composite score at granularity as fine as 10 square meters. Inputs include satellite infrared, GIS land classifications, park data, tree canopy, air pollution, noise, light pollution, built surfaces like buildings and roads, and computer vision from aerial and street imagery. The Urban Heat Index pairs CAPA Strategies ambient air temperature readings taken at two meters above ground with NatureQuant's natural and built environment intelligence to identify urban heat island risk across U.S. cities.

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Why academic researchers choose NatureQuant on Dewey

NatureScore solves a problem that has dogged environmental health research for decades: how to compare nature exposure consistently across locations and neighborhoods. Most studies have leaned on coarse proxies like NDVI satellite greenness or distance to the nearest park, which miss tree canopy quality, pollution exposure, and the usable green infrastructure at street level. NatureScore folds all of that into one number, which makes it easy to pair with health, demographic, mobility, and real estate datasets on Dewey from partners like SafeGraph, Advan Research, ClimateCheck, and ATTOM for multidisciplinary work. NatureQuant was built for healthcare systems and real estate analytics, and getting the data to academics at scale has historically been hard. Dewey is how U.S. researchers get their hands on it.

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NatureQuant academic research ideas and use cases

Nature exposure and mental health. A growing body of work uses NatureScore to test whether neighborhood nature is linked to mental health outcomes. A 2024 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health by researchers at Texas A&M and the Center for Health and Nature analyzed 61 million Texas outpatient encounters across 1,169 zip codes and found that neighborhoods scoring above 60 on NatureScore had significantly lower depression and bipolar utilization than those scoring below 40, even after adjusting for demographics and income.

Urban heat and climate adaptation. The NatureScore Urban Heat Index is built for researchers studying urban heat islands, mortality from extreme heat, and the public health case for urban tree planting in American cities. Studies can pinpoint the neighborhoods where ambient temperatures run hottest, isolate the contribution of tree canopy and impervious surfaces, and model where targeted greening would produce the largest cooling benefit. Pair with ClimateCheck for projected heat, flood, and wildfire risk to extend the analysis through 2050.

Environmental justice and access to nature. NatureScore makes it straightforward to quantify how nature access varies by income, race, and geography across U.S. neighborhoods. Researchers can map nature deprivation by census tract, link it to housing prices using ATTOM, or measure whether residents in low NatureScore neighborhoods travel further to reach green space using SafeGraph or Advan Research foot traffic to parks. The methodology paper introducing NatureScore and NatureDose in the American Journal of Health Promotion lays out the framework researchers can build on.

Real estate, planning, and policy. Urban planners, real estate economists, and policy researchers can use NatureScore to study how nature shapes property values, commute behavior, school performance, and population sorting. Combined with ATTOM tax assessor data and SafeGraph foot traffic, NatureScore lets researchers ask whether the nature premium is fairly distributed, how planning decisions reshape neighborhood scores over time, and which interventions move the needle.

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