An urban agglomeration is a highly developed spatial area formed by integrated cities. While previous studies have analyzed green space allocation at the provincial and city scales, there is insufficient information on green space allocation in urban agglomerations. For this research, a database of green spaces in eight urban agglomerations (133 cities) in China from 2002 to 2019 was constructed to better understand the equity of green space distribution among land resources. A green space equity index (GEI) was established based on the Theil index and combined with GeoDetector to analyze the differences in urban agglomeration green spaces. The main conclusions are as follows: The sum of the GEI of China’s urban agglomerations has increased significantly, rising from 3.74 in 2002 to 6.34 in 2019. The GEI value for each of the eight urban agglomerations was kept under 0.01. Polarized development has occurred within urban agglomeration cities, and the allocation of green space in megacities is relatively weak, especially in the more economically developed Yangtze River Delta and Guanzhong urban agglomerations. The average temperature, humidity, and precipitation have dominant influences in determining the GEI values. This paper provides a new perspective on the management and allocation of urban agglomeration green spaces.

With the continuous promotion of the rural revitalisation strategy, the planning and organisation of individual villages can hardly adapt to the current development needs of rural areas, causing synergistic development among villages to become a critical goal in promoting the sustainable development of rural areas. Reconstructing the development space of traditional village clusters can reduce their development gaps and promote coordinated development. Understanding the connections between traditional village units can support adaptive reconstructions of village spatial network structures and offer scientific and reasonable development planning strategies. Based on geographical and economic data publicly released in 2022, this study takes the traditional villages of the Fuchun River Basin in China as an example and uses village development quality and the shortest traffic time crawled in real time by Python to construct a spatial connection model of traditional villages in the Fuchun River Basin. The study also uses social network analysis to analyse the characteristics of the spatial network structure. The results show that (1) the intensity of spatial connections in these traditional villages is severely polarised and imbalanced. (2) The spatial network structure is in the development stage; few villages act as intermediaries, and the networks have poor connectivity and integrity. (3) The connection density within cohesive subgroups varies considerably. No complete transmission path exists among the subgroups, and the path of collaborative development is imperfect. These findings can optimise and reconstruct the selected spatial network of traditional villages to integrate and upgrade their development. The framework system also holds reference significance for other similar rural traditional villages.

As the spaces for dialogue between the past and the future, museums are essential to human well-being and social sustainability. Here, we collected data from 328 cities in 31 provinces of mainland China from 1980 to 2019 to investigate the changes in number and spatial inequalities of museums. The results showed that: (1) in mainland China, there were only 137 museums in 1980, and while this increased to 5626 in 2019, China still possessed only four museums per million people; (2) the increasing number of museums lagged behind the growth rate of both the population and economy at both the province and city level; (3) the Gini coefficient of museums per million people was only 0.27 in 2019, indicating relative equality of visiting opportunities among the provinces of China; (4) the Gini coefficients of per capita museums in some provinces were higher than that of the whole nation, with the highest ~0.6 in 2010 and 0.4 in 2017; (5) the economic competitiveness and human well-being of a city were promoted by an increased number of museums. We suggest that the central government of China should increase the number of museums in all provinces, while some provinces should pay more attention to the inequality in the distribution of cultural facilities among cities.

Understanding the research lineage of rural landscape ecosystem services (RLESs) is of importance for improving rural landscapes and developing sustainable ecosystem services. However, there is currently no literature analysis on the scientific quantification and visualization of RLESs. In this study, 4524 articles related to RLESs from 1990 to 2021 were analyzed using the bibliometric method and ISI Web of Science database. The results show that RLES research hotspots have gradually shifted from the early keywords of “vegetation”, “land use change”, “agriculture”, “rural gradients” and “models” to the emerging “cultural ecosystem services”, “rural tourism”, “landscape preferences” and “policy guidance”. Scholars from developed and developing countries place different emphases on research hotspots in terms of research content, scale and methodology due to differences in their research backgrounds and other aspects. In addition, five categories of research fronts were obtained through literature co-citation analysis. Through burst word detection analysis, combined with basic research and research hotspots and frontier analysis, we concluded that future RLES research will focus on four areas: (1) the relationship and collaboration between and management of biodiversity and ecosystem services; (2) the landscape value of RLESs; (3) land-use changes and ecosystem service values; and (4) research methods for innovative RLESs. Our findings may contribute to better in-depth RLES research by providing a theoretical reference and practical help for future related research.

The composition of urban forests (UFs) exhibits homogenization among cities compared with rural forests (RFs) among different climate zones. However, the degree of homogenization in subtropical UFs and its difference from RFs remain unclear. In this study, we examined tree species composition and diversity in UFs in 19 cities in China’s subtropical zone with precipitation ranging from 458 to 1852 mm and compared them with RFs. We found that (1) the species composition similarity, Jaccard index (J~0.27), between UFs was significantly higher than that (J~0.15) of RFs, indicating biotic homogenization; (2) tree species richness, Simpson, Shannon–Wiener, and Pielou index of UFs converged along the precipitation gradient; (3) the similarity of tree composition between UFs increased as precipitation of the cities were more similar; (4) the UFs in the 19 cities contained a total of 932 tree species, among which the nonnative species were more prevalent than the native species, and the top 37 species with high frequency appeared in 80% of the cities; and (5) Salix babylonica, Ginkgo biloba, Platycladus orientalis, Juniperus chinensis, and other tree species were suitable for planting in UFs in subtropical zones, regardless of humidity. The findings contribute to the understanding of urban forest development and provide insights for implementing greening policies aimed at providing additional ecosystem services.