Natural environments are changing with shifts in fire regimes. A little-understood impact is change to the interactions people have with forests. Generally, forests invoke positive feelings, but wildfire changes both forests and people’s experiences of them. These were investigated with attention to the ever-changing physical characteristics of fire-adapted forests. In a mixed method approach, interviews

Although the availability of natural space is found to be associated with the reduction of neighborhood-level violent crimes, such relationship is often confounded by heightened public surveillance in such spaces. Using satellite remote sensing data and official crime record, we examined the extent to which natural space coverage and population-weighted exposure were associated with assault crime rates

Understanding how mobility-based green space exposure influences momentary wellbeing is vital to promote life quality. Based on a survey conducted in 2017 characterizing residents’ daily activities and environmental pollution exposure in Meiheyuan Community of Beijing, we use Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Green View Index (GVI) to gauge the amount and visibility of exposure to green

Walking and high-quality walking environments are essential for sustainable and healthy cities. Walkability depends on both objective environmental features and perceived aspects. However, less is known about how the interplay between objective and perceived walkability influences walking behaviour across different urban contexts. We conducted a spatially explicit comparison of walkability and walking

Strategic planning approaches are essential for addressing the complex and multi-dimensional challenges in selecting blue-green infrastructure (BGI) location. The development of planning support systems (PSS) for BGI siting often lacks a value-based approach with early stakeholder engagement. In this study, we used value-focused thinking (VFT) to adapt and develop a BGI planning support framework to

Effective climate change adaptation planning requires evaluating the interplay of physical landscape characteristics and community perceptions of places. Geographic information system (GIS)-based approaches to measuring environmental values can identify locations for planning prioritization. But they seldom are used to consider spatial differences in socio-ecological worldview. This study aims to identify

Location-based games provide an opportunity to collect crowdsourced, spatially explicit data that can be used in decision-making processes in forest planning. While these games have been more widely used in collecting mapping and modelling data, there is limited research on their suitability for collecting location-based data on human preferences, opinions, and emotions in these contexts. Collecting

After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Japanese government reconstructed coastal protection facilities to mitigate extreme disasters and coastal erosion. However, the substantial compression of coastal zones poses a challenge in coping with sea level rise, while maintaining a sustainable coastal ecosystem. To clarify the impact of environmental factors and sea level rise on coastal ecosystems

European cities consistently seek to improve urban environments for their residents, yet often struggle to find solutions to address urban issues while engaging citizens. The European Union funds research and innovation projects proposing nature-based solutions to address climate change, biodiversity, human health and wellbeing in cities under the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programs. The presented

Urban natural spaces with high wildness degrees could harbor greater biodiversity and provide more experiences of nature for urbanites than green–blue spaces that are perfectly manicured and regularly maintained. Existing empirical studies have suggested that people tend to prefer moderately wild landscapes. However, urbanites’ preferences for varying wildness degrees of urban landscapes have rarely

Exposure to greenspaces has well-established benefits for the health and well-being of urban dwellers. Among these greenspaces, peri-urban parks (PUPs), which are human-modified, large-scale, and public-accessible greenspaces located on the urban fringe, have received increasing attention from policymakers and researchers in recent years, as the limited provision of greenspaces in urban areas barely

Green infrastructure (GI) has developed as a sustainable approach to the mitigation of urban floods. While machine learning (ML) models have exhibited advantages in urban flood simulation, their direct application to support the quantitative planning of GI at the city scale remains a challenge. To address this, an interpretable ML model based on support vector machine (SVM) and the Shapley additive

Childhood nature experiences have been identified as critical factors of Nature Relatedness (NR) at the individual level. This exploratory study delved into the distinct contribution of different forms of childhood experiences to NR in early adulthood, focusing on the living environment and actual contact with nature, along with nature education and the influence of people around. NR scores and self-reported

Valuing nature through attention to urban greening offers some remedy to ‘Extinction of Experience’ – the decline in diversity and quality of people’s relationships to nature. Unfortunately, while the role and value of greenspaces are increasingly recognised, recognition and valuing does not always translate into beneficial experiences for urban dwellers. This study examined people’s relationships

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread repercussions, affecting all aspects of society, from global economics to everyday social interactions. Due to the significant uncertainty caused by the pandemic, many individuals sought solace from nature. Freshwater environments, or inland blue spaces, are one type of natural environment that may have acted as a vital public health resource for communities

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) proposed four essential indicators (being away, extent, fascinating, and compatibility) for understanding urban and natural restoration quality. However, previous studies have overlooked the impact of spatial structure (the visual relationships between scene entities) and neighboring environments on restoration quality as they mostly relied on isolated questionnaires

Most urban green spaces (UGSs) today are under intensive maintenance practices, including mowing, cutting and/or chemical input, among many other practices. A growing body of research has questioned the biodiversity value of highly manicured UGSs and suggested the biodiversity potential of reduced-intensity maintenance regimes. However, the evidence for a relationship between maintenance and biodiversity

In times of rapid urban expansion, urgent demand for housing and simultaneously efforts to minimise the use of urban land are competing objectives. The concept of large housing estates (LHE) has therefore regained interest. This resurgence raises questions about the living conditions within these historically stigmatised complexes. While liveability studies often rely on surveys, we present a globally

Raingardens, as part of urban green infrastructure, are being retrofitted in cities worldwide to contribute to urban sustainability and resilience. Technical function is essential, as is aesthetic function to optimise their community acceptance. Unlike technical design guidelines, aesthetic design guidelines for raingardens are limited. Experience of a landscape can contribute to its bio-physical sustainability

The soundscape approach considers sound as a resource from a user perspective in the planning of public spaces. While this approach is garnering increased research attention, practitioners rarely integrate sound into their practice beyond noise mitigation. Yet, sound design of public spaces has long been a major focus of sound installation artists, who offer creative site-specific interventions to

Urban agriculture has garnered increasing attention as a nature-based solution to achieve urban sustainability. Besides producing quality food for urban residents, urban agriculture could provide diverse and non-tangible ecosystem services that still need to be explored. While prior research has investigated direct stakeholders’ (e.g., urban farmers and growers) perspectives on ecosystem services from

Local government is at the forefront of providing communities with urban greenspace, amidst responding to global challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth. Much research has focused on the demands for more urban greenspace; far less has examined issues concerning supply. Better understanding of the dilemmas faced by those charged with the task of providing urban greenspace

Driving in urban environments is an essential part of urban residents’ daily life. We still know little about impacts of a wide range of greenness on driving performance in real urban environments, after controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, driving record, and other environmental factors. This missing knowledge prevents policymakers and professionals from using appropriate planning and design

Urban forest management plans (UFMPs) are a key element of the planning process in urban forestry. While we can learn about management intentions by analyzing the content of UFMPs, less is known about happens after plan implementation has begun. This study fills this gap by exploring how is UFMP implementation advancing. To do this we asked municipal urban forest professionals working in Canadian municipalities

Protecting and enhancing biodiversity in urban areas is critical for meeting international conservation commitments, and has a vital role to play in the health and wellbeing of city residents. Yet, urbanisation can have devastating impacts on biodiversity, with urban development typically delivering landscapes in which habitat remains only as small, fragmented patches, surrounded by an inhospitable

Urban forests are a critical element of urban environmental planning. Greater awareness of the ecosystem services provided by urban forests over the last two decades has led to an increased interest in improving urban forest management. In Canada, the conditions of management are usually articulated by a municipal government in an urban forest management plan (UFMP). This study responds to previous

Accumulative evidence and knowledge have revealed a close relationship between environments and human emotions. Residential open space (ROS) plays a significant role in shaping the older adults’ health and well-being. However, there is a lack of evidence for the association between various types of ROSs and the older adults’ emotions. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the effects

Schools offer prospects to enhance adolescent health by encouraging physical activity. This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent health research, drawing on data from physical fitness and mental health surveys conducted in 2015. The participants included 8,967 seventh-grade students across 45 junior high schools in Dalian, China. By employing multilevel analytical models, this research

Given that green space patterns and population density often show opposing trends over space, this could lead to trade-off (distance/population decay) relationships. Consequently, this paper utilized the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) data from Shanghai, China, to investigate whether there is a spatial trade-off in the health effects of green spaces on people’s inactivity. Our findings

The restoration of urban sealed soils is a major stake for urban planners. In particular, characterizing their resilience from a biotic perspective is of primary importance for remobilizing these artificialized substrates in urban green spaces. Using Marseille (France) as a case study, we implemented a metabarcoding next generation sequencing approach to characterize the diversity and the composition

Numerous studies underscore the role of community gardens in sustaining food security, physical and mental health, and social networks during the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to community resilience in different contexts of each country. Despite the rich history of urban gardening, Japan remains a geographical gap. This study conducted a mixed-method case study in suburban Tokyo and addresses the

Although research shows that individuals report higher levels of happiness when viewing green environments, the dose curve describing the impact of greenery on happiness remains undefined. Current literature only presents dose curves representing the associations between stress recovery and tree coverage, and does not explore how this fluctuates for different types of green infrastructure. Using an

This article focuses on the evolution of anthropogenic pressure across Czech large-scale protected areas (protected landscape areas and national parks, n = 30) over the last 60 years. In four periods (1960s; 1990; 2004; between 2016 and 2020) we analysed the development of artificial structures (built-up areas, recreational areas, roads, dirt roads, and streets) and their impact on landscape fragmentation

Vector cellular automata (VCA) models, which excel at representing spatiotemporal dynamics of irregularly shaped land parcels, have been widely employed in land use change simulations. However, current research faces the following issues: (1) most VCA models neglect the spatial heterogeneity of driving factors within each land parcel when evaluating the environmental driving effects; (2) when calculating

Urban and forest trees provide valuable ecosystem services. However, they are increasingly threatened by invasive forest pests and pathogens. Trees in urban areas are often the first potential hosts non-native tree-feeding insects and tree pathogens (“pests”) encounter after introduction in a novel region. If the trees encountered are suitable hosts, these pests can establish and become invasive –

Urban expansion and sprawl lead to loss of green space. This has the potential to degrade natural capital and associated ecosystem services. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) are a planning tool to delineate where growth may or may not occur as a strategy to protect green and open space.However, how these policies impact ecosystem services is unknown, particularly across multiple years. Here we compare

Sexual crime is a critical global social problem. There remains a critical knowledge gap concerning whether and to what extent sexual crimes in public outdoor spaces can be influenced by landscape morphology of green spaces. This missing knowledge hinders the effective use of green spaces to reduce sexual crimes in these public settings. To address this issue, we collected a dataset comprising 5,155

Existing research on urban dynamic simulations has primarily focused on horizontal aspects, whereas vertical changes have remained relatively unexplored. Although a few preliminary studies have attempted to simulate three-dimensional (3D) urban dynamics, these have generally amounted to rudimentary amalgamations of horizontal urban expansion simulation and vertical height estimation. In this study

Urban green spaces are highly important for the health and well-being of urban residents, especially under conditions of ongoing climate change and urbanisation. However, vegetation in urban parks may also present a risk to human health through the presence of allergenic plants and release of allergy-inducing pollen. Using the city of Leipzig as a case study, we monitored pollen abundance in two inner

Walking and access to nature are two of the most effective health promotion and disease prevention strategies. There has been a growing interest in the dynamic pathways among access to nature, walking, and health. Effective measurement of these variables is the prerequisite to advancing our understanding of such pathways. However, contrasting to the rigorous methods available for walking and health

Public parks are critical urban infrastructures offering health, environmental, social, and cultural benefits to people. However, the idea of park quality has lacked a clear operational definition and normative standard for measurement. We provide critical insights into existing park quality instruments and advocate for an alternative approach. First, due to the significant diversity in parks, inherent

The benefits of urban green spaces (UGSs) for human health have been extensively documented. Nevertheless, few studies have incorporated multidimensional UGS exposure indicators, and little is known about the effectiveness of different metrics that should be prioritized as nature-based solutions for improving mental well-being. This study aimed to investigate the associations between various UGS exposure

As urbanization pressures continue to intensify globally, the implementation of green infrastructure (GI) has emerged as a critical intervention for enhancing the resilience of our communities. However, literature exploring the integration of GI planning and design within the complex mechanisms of urban systems is limited. This study posits that the sensible deployment of GI should consider place-based

Lockdown measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rise in people’s visits to forests and urban green spaces. However, as vaccination efforts progressed and infection rates declined, it remained uncertain whether forest visitation levels would return to pre-pandemic norms or even decreased. To explore the post-crisis status of forest visits, we conducted a comprehensive analysis using

The literature identifies an important research gap regarding the variability in people’s needs and preferences for Urban Green Space (UGS) depending on sociodemographic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, it is essential to understand the impact of these differences on UGS utilization preferences. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive comparative research on this topic. This study compared

The objective of the current study was to investigate, for the first time, the association between individual-level residential greenspace and redemption of antidepressant drugs in a longitudinal nationwide population-based sample in Sweden. A nationwide population-based sample of adults residing in Sweden was studied during 2013–2016 (N = 108716; N = 324378). Residential greenspace land cover was

Monitoring urbanization processes is important because they are often accompanied by intensive landscape pattern transitions and pluralistic socioeconomic changes. To effectively monitor urban expansion and support regional planning, it is essential to develop a fast, accurate and universal urban–rural classification model, especially identifying the dynamic spatial patterns of urban, urban–rural fringe

Scholars have found that many new multiuse trails are associated with neighborhood change like gentrification. However, gentrification of adjacent, gentrifiable neighborhoods is not universal, and studies of localized effects of trails are needed. This study documents gentrification and upgrading in both gentrifiable and non-gentrifiable neighborhoods along three multiuse trails funded and opened in

Like other user groups, people experiencing homelessness utilize parks and other public spaces for a variety of reasons, including recreation/leisure, physical activity, socializing, and to enjoy time in nature. However, unlike other user groups, unhoused park users also often rely on parks as a setting to engage in a variety of necessary metabolic and biophysical functions. Despite the centrality

Land subdivisions, especially in rural areas, pose a significant threat to sustainable development in many regions of the world. This issue is particularly challenging to understand in complex landscapes, where many biophysical and anthropic drivers interact without the necessary land regulatory guidance. We combined kernel density analysis and machine learning modeling to unravel the spatial patterns

Rewilding is increasingly viewed as a process-driven approach to land management that offers an alternative to traditional nature conservation, supports nature recovery, and responds to climate change. However, implementing rewilding in British local authorities can be challenging. This qualitative study explores the challenges and opportunities of implementing rewilding in a British local authority

Forests, which harbor most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity, have been and continue to be impacted by significant threats from human activities. Improving biodiversity conservation outcomes requires proactive and effective management actions to address the increasing risks, rather than merely maintaining forest cover. However, few studies have explored how to spatially inform diversified management

Rural-to-urban transformation in Southeast Asia must be discussed as a vicious cycle of hydrologic alteration, environmental degradation, and destructive land use changes that collectively jeopardize millions of lives. Particularly, top-down flood control schemes have been linked to significant degradation of the socioeconomic and biophysical features of rural landscapes and increasingly faster agricultural

The benefits and functions of urban trees are well-studied, and stewardship groups, non-governmental organizations, tree professionals, and municipal leaders aim to increase canopy cover and expand planting programs. However, urban trees also present variable risks to human safety and infrastructure based on tree species, size, age, health, and maintenance history. Furthermore, changing global climate