Landscapes in urban waterfront spaces are of high societal value as they can meet people’s physical, psychological, and social needs for health and well-being, but the relationship between waterfront landscape features and public health benefits has yet to be clarified. From the perspective of blue health, this paper takes blue spaces along the Min River of Fuzhou City as the research object. It constructs the mediation model of “Waterfront landscape characteristic (WLC)→Water-friendly environmental preference (WEP)→Emotional benefit (EB)”. The role of WEP in the mechanisms linking WLC and EB in different waterfront spaces was explored through the quantification of indicators, questionnaires, and physiological measurements. The main results showed that (1) the ability of different types of waterfront spaces to arouse positive emotions in the population is characterized by blue-dominated space > co-dominated space > green-dominated space, while the opposite is true in terms of inducing negative emotions; (2) green visibility, blue visibility, naturalness, water-friendliness, and openness are all significantly related to EBs and could affect positive emotions either directly or mediated by WEPs, but openness seems not to affect negative emotions through WEPs; (3) cleanliness affects the population’s WEP for the coherence dimension, but has no significant role in improving EBs. This study could expand new ideas for research in habitat health, provide a reference for embodied evidence-based waterfront landscape design, and help promote the construction and development of healthy cities.

We explored the spatial and temporal characteristics of the urban forest area soundscape by setting up monitoring points (70 × 70 m grid) covering the study area, recorded a total of 52 sound sources, and the results showed that: (1) The soundscape composition of the park is dominated by natural sounds and recreational sounds. (2) The diurnal variation of sound sources is opposite to that of temperature, 6:00–9:00 is the best time for the public to perceive birdsong, and after 18:00, the park is dominated by insect chirps. (3) The PSD (power spectral density) and the SDI (soundscape diversity index) of the park are greatly affected by public recreation behaviors, and some recreation behaviors may affect the vocal behavior of organisms such as birds. (4) Spaces with high canopy density can attract more birdsong and recreational sounds in summer, and the combination of “tree + lake” can attract more birdsong. Vegetation has a significant dampening effect on traffic sound. (5) Landscape spatial elements, such as the proportion of hard ground, sky, trees, and shrubs, have a significant impact on changes in the PSD, the SDI and different kinds of sound sources. The research results provide effective data support for improving the soundscape of urban forests.

Historic blocks are valuable architectural and landscape heritage, and it is important to explore the distribution characteristics of tourists to historic blocks and their landscape preferences to realize the scientific construction and conservation of historic blocks and promote their sustainable development. At present, few studies combine the analysis of tourist distribution characteristics with landscape preferences. This study takes the historic block of Three Lanes and Seven Alleys in Fuzhou as an example, combines field research and questionnaires to construct a landscape preference evaluation indicator system for the historic block, measures the distribution characteristics of tourists in the block through the heat value of tourist flow obtained from the Tencent regional heat map, and analyses the influence of landscape preference indicators on the heat value of tourist flow in the block through stepwise multiple linear regression. The research shows that: (1) the spatial and temporal variation in the heat value of tourist flow tends to be consistent throughout the block, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., showing a “rising, slightly fluctuating and then stabilizing” state, both on weekdays and on weekends. (2) The factors influencing the heat value of tourist flow in the different spatial samples are various, with commercial atmosphere, plant landscape, accessibility of the road space, architecture, and the surrounding environment having a significant impact on the heat value of tourist flow. Based on the analysis of the landscape preferences of tourists in the historic block, a landscape optimization strategy is proposed to provide a reference for the management and construction of the block.

Nature reserves are important areas delineated to protect natural resources and the ecological environment. They have various ecological functions, such as protecting biodiversity, conserving water sources, and purifying the atmosphere. However, with the rapid development of the social economy, human disturbance in natural reserves is becoming increasingly pronounced, which has seriously damaged the initial balance of the ecosystem in the reserves. Based on the specific local conditions of the reserve, this study selects four influencing factors that are closely related to human activities, namely, land use, vegetation cover, slope and elevation as the primary evaluation indicators of human disturbance. With the support of an analytic hierarchy process and GIS technology, this study conducts a comprehensive analysis of human disturbance in the Fujian Huangchulin Nature Reserve and proposes corresponding ecological restoration measures for different disturbed areas. The results indicate that the area that is seriously and completely disturbed by human activities is primarily that around the river basin, which accounts for 25.30% of the total area. The lightly disturbed area covers the largest area, followed by the intermediately disturbed area, which accounts for 37.91% and 32.96% of the total area, respectively. The smallest area is slightly disturbed and accounts for only 3.83% of the total area. Based on the comprehensive analytical results of human disturbance and the functional zoning of the natural reserves in China, the Shitan Stream area in the Huangchulin Nature Reserve is selected as the experimental site for ecological restoration. According to the human disturbance in different sectors of the Shitan Stream area and the concept of “Mountain, Water, Forest, Field, Lake and Grass,” the ecological restoration measures of the “Four-tiered Protection System” are proposed in the experiment, which are the river system restoration, brownfield restoration, soil and water conservation, and original ecological protection areas. Natural regeneration and active restoration are then combined to be implemented in different areas, and the ecological problems of brown land pollution, water system cutoff, and soil erosion have been effectively solved, and the plant coverage increased substantially. In summary, this study shows that only by taking social, economic and ecological factors into account and establishing a sound management system can restoration work proceed smoothly and achieve more environmental benefits.

Water environment quality is profoundly driven by a series of landscape characteristics. However, current knowledge is limited to the independent response of water quality to single landscape elements; this has led to poor knowledge of the potential role of structural coupling within landscapes in driving water quality changes, especially in those agroforestry-mixed mountainous watersheds with highly embedded forest-clustered landscapes and abundant headstreams. Given this fact, this study aims to evaluate whether and how the source–sink coupling structure of forest-clustered landscapes systematically drives headstream quality dynamics. We first systematically assessed the association pattern of source and sink structures within forest-clustered landscapes, and then innovatively proposed and constructed a functional framework of source–sink coupling structure of landscapes across 112 agroforestry-mixed mountainous sub-watersheds in Chongqing, China. On this basis, we further evaluated the driving pattern and predictive performance of the source–sink coupling structure of landscapes behind headstream quality dynamics. We report three findings: (1) headstream quality varied across agroforestry-mixed sub-watersheds, mapping out the source–sink structures and functions of landscapes; (2) there was significant functional coordination between source–sink structures of the forest-clustered landscapes, which significantly drove headstream quality dynamics; (3) the structural positioning and differences of the forest-clustered landscapes along the multivariate functional axes directly corresponded to and predicted headstream quality status. These findings together highlight a key logic that the response of water quality dynamics to landscapes is essentially that to the functional coupling between the source–sink structures of landscapes, rather than the simple combination of a single landscape contribution. This is the first study on the landscape–runoff association from the perspective of source–sink structural coupling, which helps to deepen understanding of the correlation mechanism between water dynamics and landscape systems, and provides a new functional dimension to the development of future landscape ecological management strategies from a local to a global scale.