Urban parks are public green spaces which have a direct impact on the daily outdoor activities of residents and visitors due to their landscape and functionality. To enhance the spatial vitality and services of urban parks to meet the needs of urban residents and visitors, managers and planners should focus on people’s perceptions and preferences of park landscape characteristics. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between visitors’ landscape preferences and environmental factors in urban parks. Fixed-point photography and mobile measurements were used to quantify the environmental factors of urban parks. Unmanned aerial vehicle observations and ground observations were used to examine physical activities and spatial behaviors of visitors to quantify their landscape preferences. Second, the differences in visitors’ landscape preferences in various types of landscape spaces were analyzed based on descriptive statistics and significance tests. Finally, a correlation analysis and principal component analysis were introduced to explore the relationship between urban park environmental factors and visitors’ landscape preferences. The results showed that visitors’ physical activities and spatial behaviors were affected by many environmental factors, especially accessibility and visible green index. Our findings also shed new light on the significant differences in visitors’ physical activities and spatial behaviors of different genders and age groups. It was observed that most male visitors were sitting, whereas female visitors preferred to take photographs. Exploring the relationship between urban parks and visitors’ landscape preferences is of great significance for improving park satisfaction, people’s happiness, and urban sustainability.

To balance ecological protection and urban development, a land use simulation model that couples an ecological network (EN) and multiple scenarios was developed based on the PLUS model. The simulation of land use in the Qiantang River Basin in 2030 successfully demonstrates the usefulness of the EN-PLUS model. In this model, conventional ecological constraints (nature reserves and water areas) and three different EN levels were taken as restricted conversion areas during the simulation. Then, four ecological constraints were coupled with four simulation scenarios: business as usual (BAU), rapid urban development (RUD), ecological protection (EP), and urban- and ecology-balanced (UEB). Information from the analysis of model simulation results can be used to reduce the potential damage to a range of land cover types. However, this protective effect is not obvious under the RUD scenario due to the impact of significant human disturbance. Furthermore, although EP is the scenario with the least ecological damage at the whole watershed scale, this is not the case for all subbasins. This indicates the existence of a landscape scale effect. Therefore, the best development scenario should be selected by comprehensively weighing the scale effect and the ecological characteristics of each subbasin.