No Association Found between Noontime Shade Coverage and Poverty Rates of Socioeconomically Diverse Zip Codes within Metro Detroit

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

7-1-2026

Publication Title

J Am Acad Dermatol

Keywords

Dermatology

Abstract

Advising patients to seek shade during the brightest times of day is among the first directions given to prevent UV-associated skin damage. This study seeks to categorize shade variances in socioeconomically diverse zip codes of a major metropolitan area to determine if proportional coverage corresponds with poverty rates as a metric of population health. Shademapper.app provides a model of ambient shade in a given location accurate to the minute on any day in a calendar year. Weighted population centroids of 108 urban zip codes in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI metropolitan area served as proxy addresses to extract a uniform number of pixels between zip codes. Rurality was determined using HUD RUCA coding, and only zip codes categorized as urban (RUCA 1) were included for analysis. Using the website functionality, grayscale images of each zip code were selected and all dark (shade) and light (sun) pixels were measured to calculate the proportion of total shade at noon on every day in a calendar year. The average was taken throughout the year and compared in a linear regression to poverty rates for each respective zip code. There was no association found between the percentage of a given zip code’s shade coverage at noon and the respective poverty rates in metropolitan Detroit (R2 = 0.052; p = 0.018). While this study did not identify a strong correlation between poverty and shade in a zip code, it remains important to consider the disparities in “neighborhood health” when counseling patients on their UV exposure risk.

Volume

95

Issue

1

First Page

AB313

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