Background and Objectives: As urbanisation is a significant global trend, there is a profound need for biodiversity protection in urban ecosystems. Moreover, the potential of urban green space to support urban biodiversity should be appreciated. Butterflies are environmental indicators that are sensitive to urbanisation. Therefore, it is important to identify butterfly distribution patterns and the factors influencing butterfly diversity and species composition in urban parks within cities. Research Highlights: To our knowledge, ours is the first study evaluating the effects of both land cover and local habitat features on butterfly species composition in urban parks of Beijing, China. Materials and Methods: In this study, we surveyed butterfly richness and abundance in 28 urban parks in Beijing, China. The parks differed in age and location in the urban area. Meanwhile, we investigated the green space in the surroundings of the parks at multi-spatial scales at the landscape level. We also investigated local park characteristics including the age of the park (Age), perimeter/area ratio of the park (SQPRA), area of the park (ha) (Area), green space cover within the park (Greenp), nectar plant species richness (Necpl), abundance of flowering nectar plants (Necabu) and overall plant species richness (Pl). Generalised linear models (GLMs) and redundancy discriminant analysis (RDA) were applied to relate butterfly diversity and butterfly species composition to environmental variables, respectively. Results: We recorded 3617 individuals belonging to 26 species from July to September in 2019. Parks on the city fringe had significantly higher butterfly diversity. Butterfly species richness was mostly related to total plant richness. The abundance of flowering nectar plants was closely linked to butterfly abundance. Land cover had little impact on butterfly diversity and community structure in urban parks. Conclusions: Once a park has sufficient plants and nectar resources, it becomes a useful haven for urban butterflies, regardless of the surrounding land cover. Well-planned urban parks focused on local habitat quality support butterfly conservation.

Soundscape is an essential component of urban forest landscapes, acoustic indices can be effectively used to monitor biodiversity, but whether they can be used for soundscape perception assessments needs to be further explored. In this study, soundscape recordings were collected in Beijing Eastern Suburban Forest Park, and acoustic indices were used to explore the relationship between the acoustic environment and soundscape perception, as well as the possible effects of temporal changes. To achieve this, audio recordings collected in spring and summer were divided, and a total of 90 audio segments were extracted from three time periods—morning, afternoon, and evening—to calculate the acoustic index and complete a questionnaire survey. The urban forest soundscape was evaluated according to the eight perceptual attribute quality indicators of ISO 12913, and generalized linear models were constructed to quantify the relationships between the acoustic indices and perception. The results showed that the temporal variation of the soundscape influenced the subjective evaluation, with the highest overall evaluation relating to the morning soundscape. The combination of acoustic indices explained the soundscape pleasantness (R² = 0.58) better than the soundscape eventfulness (R² = 0.54), demonstrating the utility of these indices in soundscape assessment. Linking acoustic indices to human perception generates innovative ideas and theoretical support for soundscape enhancement, contributing to a more pleasant acoustic environment and maximizing the social value of urban forests.

(1) Background: With rapid urbanization, birds are facing a variety of challenges. Evaluating bird behaviour changes in response to urbanization can help us understand how to make them coexist sustainably with humans. We aimed to investigate whether birds inhabiting residential areas differed in their escape behaviour and their influencing factors. (2) Methods: We used the flight initiation distance (FID), the horizontal distance between the observer and the target bird when it escapes, to measure the escape behaviour of birds. We chose 40 urban residential areas within the 5th ring road in Beijing and conducted surveys each month for one year. We applied Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) separately to evaluate the response variable of FID for the total species, the most common species, and the other species. (3) Results: Birds that appear more frequently in residential areas or as ground foragers, insectivores, and omnivores are better adapted to human interference and have shorter FIDs. Individual initial conditions affect bird FID, and environmental characteristics can be used as predictors for the most common birds. Tree canopy coverage was found to positively affect FID, while floor area ratio (FAR) is negatively correlated with FID. (4) Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that birds in residential areas have been adapting to the human environment, and urban tree canopies can provide refuge for birds to avoid human interference. Our study focused on the response of bird FIDs to human interference and urban trees under high urbanization, which has substantial practical implications for urban managers to improve habitat quality to ensure that birds coexist with human beings.

(1) Background: Urban parks play a critical role in conserving biodiversity within city landscapes, yet the effects of fine-scale microhabitat heterogeneity remain poorly understood. This study examines how land cover and vegetation unit type within parks influence butterfly diversity. (2) Methods: From July to September 2019 and June to September 2020, adult butterflies were surveyed in 27 urban parks across Beijing. We classified vegetation into units based on vertical structure and management intensity, and then applied the patch–matrix framework and landscape metrics to quantify fine-scale heterogeneity in vegetation unit composition and configuration. Generalized linear models (GLM), generalized additive models (GAM), and random forest (RF) models were applied to identify factors influencing butterfly richness (Chao1 index) and abundance. (3) Results: In total, 10,462 individuals representing 37 species, 28 genera, and five families were recorded. Model results revealed that the proportion of park area covered by spontaneous herbaceous areas (SHA), wooded spontaneous meadows (WSM), and the Shannon diversity index (SHDI) of vegetation units were positively associated with butterfly species richness. In contrast, butterfly abundance was primarily influenced by the proportion of park area covered by cultivated meadows (CM) and overall green-space coverage. (4) Conclusions: Fine-scale vegetation patch composition within urban parks significantly influences butterfly diversity. Our findings support applying the patch–matrix framework at intra-park scales and suggest that integrating spontaneous herbaceous zones—especially wooded spontaneous meadows—with managed flower-rich meadows will enhance butterfly diversity in urban parks.

As the first visual element, color is the most attractive in the forest landscape. There are various kinds of forest colors; however, the human eye’s ability to recognize them is limited. In order to combine color composition and human eye recognition ability to quantify forest colors more appropriately and to improve the ornamental effect of forest color landscapes more precisely, we have constructed a forest color palette using k-means clustering based on the color information of 986 forest images from 40 national forest parks in China. The differences in color recognition accuracy and sensitivity among populations and colors were analyzed. The effect of forest color patch indices on color identification accuracy for interior and distant forest landscapes was also explored. The results were as follows: (1) forest color could be divided into eight color families—orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, purple, and red. (2) For humans, the recognition accuracy was highest for green and lowest for blue-green. (3) For interior forest landscapes, the mean area proportion and fractal dimension of the color patches showed significant positive effects on color recognition accuracy, whereas the number and density of color patches showed significant negative effects. For distant forest landscapes, the density and Shannon’s diversity index of the color patches showed significant positive effects for color recognition accuracy, whereas the number, edge density, division index, and cohesion of the color patches showed significant negative effects. We thus suggest that it is necessary to increase the complexity of the color patch shape when creating interior forest landscapes and to focus on the diversity and balance of color matching when creating distant forest landscapes. In future studies, the collection pathways for forest images should be expanded, and color information extraction algorithms that incorporate human perception should be selected. This will improve the data available for forest color studies and enable the construction of a more accurate forest color palette.