In recent years, the impact of surface heat islands in urban street canyons has become increasingly apparent. However, the research on the use of trees to mitigate surface heat islands remains limited. To address this gap, this study combines experiments and simulations to analyze the cooling effect of trees on surface temperatures under varying timeframes and layouts in an east–west street canyon. The results reveal that the temperature of the road decreases by 10–15 °C, which is 2–4 times greater than that on the south side. Moreover, at 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon, the cooling effect on the south side is 10.3 °C, which is twice that of the north side. In practical planning and design, the diameter of the tree canopy should be maximized, and trees with leaf-area densities greater than 1.5 m²/m³ should be selected. Additionally, the layout of trees should be optimized to maximize the tree canopy coverage. These findings have important implications for optimizing plant selection and placement in street canyons.

Wen Deng, Huadi Chen, Hongjun Su, Xiaohua Wu, Zhongyu Xie, Yanfeng Wu, Huiyong Shen. IJSC 2020;13:142-50. https://doi.org/10.15283/ijsc19073

At present, people’s growing need for a beautiful ecological environment needs to be met. As a high-quality ecological product, greenways help improve the living environment and promote green and coordinated development. How to scientifically and rationally plan greenway routes and expand the green ecological network has become an important issue for the sustainable development of high-density built-up areas. Therefore, this study determines the suitability evaluation system of urban greenway alignment selection based on spatial constructiveness, greenway accessibility, resource attractiveness and public demand through factor analysis. Taking Xixi Wetland to South Lake in Yuhang District as an example, combining urban multi-source data and GIS spatial analysis methods, all routes suitable for greenway construction in the study area were determined, and four excellent greenway routes were initially identified through manual correction. Subsequently, the PSO-BP neural network model was trained using 172 greenway samples to obtain a greenway alignment suitability evaluation model with an accuracy of more than 96%, which was used for subsequent greenway alignment optimization. The above four preliminary greenway routes are substituted into the PSO-BP model to obtain the optimal greenway routes in the study area. The results show that there are 17 indicators in 4 levels and 8 dimensions in the urban greenway route selection potential model, among which two indicators, public cycling and running demand, have a greater weight and should be highly considered in the route selection assessment. The optimal planned route for the greenway start from Guangfu Temple entrance of Xixi Wetland, follow the roadside green belt and Yuhangtang River greenway to South Lake. The study obtained the best planning route for the greenway from Xixi Wetland to South Lake in Yuhang District, which is a new practice of landscape garden planning and design supported by multisource data and new technologies, with a view to providing a reference for the preferential selection of urban greenway routes in similar high-density built-up areas.

Objective With the rapid development of urbanization and road motorization, problems such as air pollution, traffic safety and public health are becoming increasingly serious, which have caused inconvenience and even safety risks to children’s school trip, and profoundly affect children’s behaviors of school trip. A healthy and safe school trip space is a prerequisite for children’s active school trip and a humanized place to realize children’s free interaction and healthy growth. However, in China, there are currently problems such as narrow space, broken landscape and traffic accidents with respect to the school trip space for children, and existing evaluation tools have not fully formed a detailed theoretical framework while failing to effectively integrate with design work. Therefore, it is necessary to construct an environmental health and safety assessment system for school trip space. Methods Based on the combing of literature regarding children’s cognitive and behavioral characteristics, the influencing factors of active school trip, and the behavioral characteristics of school-age children during their school trip, this research identifies the main needs of children during their school trip, namely walking safety and growth comfort needs, which include walking space safety, social environment safety, growth health comfort, and activity space diversity. Based on this, the research constructs an environmental health and safety assessment system for school trip space. In terms of data collection, the research collects data mainly through mining data on urban street and terrain, field shooting of streetscape pictures, field measurement and scoring, etc. Semantic segmentation of streetscape pictures, GIS visibility analysis, color entropy method, cosine law and other analysis methods are adopted. Results In this research, 13 evaluation indicators are selected. These indicators include: Accessibility, safety of street crossing facilities, street crossing distance, school trip independence, crowd density, street eye surveillance coverage, monitor monitoring coverage, sound environment quality, green visibility, color richness, color harmony, accessible green biomass, and number of landscape facilities. According to the results of the hierarchical analysis method, walking safety has the highest weighting value of 0.35 and spatial diversity has the lowest weighting value of 0.13, which indicates that in the environmental health and safety assessment system for school trip space, the walking space safety is considered to be the primary factor influencing children’s active school trip, and the diversity of activity space has less influence.Through the stratified sampling method, the school trip spaces of Qiuyi Primary School, Qiantang Experimental Primary School and Shengli Primary School are screened out from the first batch of pilot elementary schools included in the “Comfortable Passage” program, with the health and safety assessment of the school trip space of such schools being conducted according to the environmental health and safety assessment system for school trip space. The results show that the average health and safety score of school trip space of the three schools above as a whole is 2.97 points, the average health and safety score of the school trip space of Qiushi Primary School is 3.27, higher than Qiantang Experimental Primary School (3.10) and Shengli Primary School (2.41). Through the interview survey, the access structure of the above three primary schools and parents’ attitude towards their children’s walking to school are obtained. The results show that the support degree of parents of students in Qiushi Primary School for their children’s walking to school is 63%, higher than Qiantang Experimental Primary School (50%) and Shengli Primary School (43%). In terms of the proportion of children walking to school, Qiushi Primary school (51.8%) is higher than Qiantang Experimental Primary School (47.3%) and Shengli Primary School (40%). The results of interview survey are consistent with the results of evaluation, indicating that the evaluation system has high accuracy. Conclusion According to the evaluation results, the main problems in the school trip space of the three schools include the safety of walking, the insufficiency of space for rest and communication, the obstruction of social surveillance line of sight, and the lack of vegetation. Therefore, based on the current status and characteristics of regional construction, four targeted improvement strategies are proposed, including perfecting the infrastructure construction of school trip space, creating diverse activity spaces within school trip space, improving the landscape quality of school trip space, and establishing a social surveillance system for school trip space. The research results can provide guidance for the improvement of environment of school trip space and have important theoretical and practical significance for the construction of child-friendly cities. In addition, different from subjective evaluation and field survey, digital and parametric data analysis methods such as multi-source data, semantic segmentation and GIS visibility analysis are introduced into the environmental health and safety assessment system for school trip space to achieve objective and quantitative evaluation and analysis of the health and safety of school trip space, thus providing a scientific, standard and objective technical means for the evaluation of urban school trip space. Quantitative methods and optimization measures may also be applied to relevant urban research.

Small towns in mountainous regions face significant challenges in formulating effective landscape zoning strategies due to pronounced landscape fragmentation, which is driven by both the dominance of large-scale forest resources and the lack of coordination between administrative planning departments. To tackle this problem, this study focused on Yuqian, a quintessential small mountainous town in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. The town’s layout was divided into a grid network measuring 70 m × 70 m. A two-step cluster process was employed using ArcGIS and SPSS software to analyze five landscape variables: altitude, slope, land use, heritage density, and visual visibility. Further, eCognition software’s semi-automated segmentation technique, complemented by manual adjustments, helped delineate landscape character types and areas. The overlay analysis integrated these areas with administrative village units, identifying four landscape character types across 35 character areas, which were recategorized into four planning and management zones: urban comprehensive service areas, agricultural and cultural tourism development areas, industrial development growth areas, and mountain forest ecological conservation areas. This result optimizes the current zoning types. These zones closely match governmental sustainable development zoning requirements. Based on these findings, we propose integrated landscape management and conservation strategies, including the cautious expansion of urban areas, leveraging agricultural and cultural tourism, ensuring industrial activities do not impact the natural and village environment adversely, and prioritizing ecological conservation in sensitive areas. This approach integrates spatial and administrative dimensions to enhance landscape connectivity and resource sustainability, providing key guidance for small town development in mountainous regions with unique environmental and cultural contexts.