Urban green spaces play a crucial role in maintaining urban ecosystem sustainability by providing numerous ecosystem services. How to quantify and evaluate the ecological benefits and services of urban green spaces remains a hot topic currently, while the evaluation is barely applied or implemented in urban design and planning. In this study, super-high-resolution aerial images were used to acquire the spatial distribution of urban green spaces; a modified pre-stratified random sampling method was applied to obtain the vegetation information of the four types of urban green spaces in Luohe, a common plain city in China; and i-Tree Eco model was further used to assess the vegetation structure and various ecosystem services including air quality improvement, rainfall interception, carbon storage, and sequestration provided by four types of urban green spaces. The modeling results reveal that there were about 1,006,251 trees in this area. In 2013, all the trees in these green spaces could store about 54,329 t of carbon, sequester about 4973 t of gross carbon, remove 92 t of air pollutants, and avoid 122,637 m³ of runoff. The study illustrates an innovative method to reveal different types of urban green spaces with distinct ecosystem service productivity capacity to better understand their various roles in regulating the urban environment. The results could be used to assist urban planners and policymakers to optimize urban green space structure and composition to maximize ecosystem services provision.

As China’s rapid development has gradually expanded beyond urban areas, vernacular landscape as a significant expression of local conditions receives more and more attention. This paper aims to formulate a comprehensive zoning scheme for vernacular landscapes of China. The zoning applies zoning methods and technical means of the Geographic Information System. Based on the understanding of the vernacular landscape concept, the main factors that determine the feature of the vernacular landscape are identified, including landforms, climate, hydrology, vegetation, land use, settlements, housing, population, economy, and customs. Then, the indicators that can significantly reflect the characteristics of each factor are selected to construct an indicator system for comprehensive zoning. We combine quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the spatial differentiation patterns of Chinese vernacular landscapes comprehensively. The prior zoning principle is a combination of the principles of relative consistency of natural constituents of vernacular landscape and relative consistency of human constituents of vernacular landscape. Simultaneously, it considers the combination of the principles of synthesis and dominant factors, the combination of the principles of top-down and bottom-up, the combination of the principles of spatial integrity and continuity, and the principle of hierarchical zoning. Based on indicator evaluation and essential zoning basis, using overlay analysis and comparative analysis methods, the country is divided into two-grade spatial units of vernacular landscapes by two steps: 8 vernacular landscape regions and 56 vernacular landscape sub-regions. It provides theoretical support for protecting and developing vernacular landscape characteristics, and exerting regional advantages to achieve comprehensive development.