As one form of urban green infrastructure, city parks provide essential ecosystem services and serve as a vital link connecting citizens with natural ecosystems. The public, as the primary beneficiaries of urban park ecosystem services, plays a crucial role in guiding the improvement and development trends of urban park planning. Most existing studies assess the comprehensive value of green spaces from a macro scale, with few focusing on the cultural and regulatory ecosystem services of urban parks and public perception of these services at the park level. This study targets 11 typical urban parks in Luoyang City, collecting 771 samples through field mapping and surveys. It analyzes users’ socio-demographic characteristics, perception abilities, usage preferences, and service satisfaction, linking these subjective factors with objective elements of the park environment, such as fitness and recreational facilities. The results indicate that respondents with knowledge of ecosystem services are better able to evaluate and understand services such as air pollution reduction and noise reduction in parks, while those without such knowledge tend to focus more on services that they can intuitively perceive, such as biodiversity conservation and microclimate regulation. Additionally, the middle-income group exhibits a higher level of awareness of park ecosystem services, which depends on their active social participation. The findings of this study suggest that enhancing public understanding of ecosystem services through environmental education is key to improving the quality of urban ecosystems.

Traditional villages are an important cultural heritage left by China’s agrarian civilization and serve as a testament to the historical development of the Chinese nation. The study of spatial and cultural differentiation in traditional villages is significant for their future preservation and development. Existing studies predominantly adopt a macro perspective, focusing on large-scale regions, and lack investigations from a micro perspective in medium- and small-scale areas. This study utilizes ArcGIS 10.8 for spatial analysis, multi-factor geographic detectors, and cultural geography spatial zoning methods to explore the spatial structure and cultural differentiation of 305 traditional villages in western Henan. The results indicate that the distribution of traditional villages in this region is significantly clustered and uneven, primarily concentrated in specific districts of Sanmenxia and Luoyang. Per capita GDP and the distance to roads are negatively correlated with the distribution of traditional settlements, reflecting the positive impact of lower economic levels and remote locations on village preservation. The spatial layout of traditional villages in western Henan exhibits clustering patterns, with cultural zoning characterized by distinct residential forms. This study, through the analysis of the spatial structure characteristics and influencing factors of traditional villages in the western Henan region, provides a new perspective on the formation and evolution of traditional villages, revealing the cultural differentiation characteristics of western Henan. The research results offer directional guidance for the conservation strategies of traditional villages in western Henan and provide a decision-making reference for cultural heritage conservation practices in similar regions.

Urban vitality is a concept that reflects dynamic changes in economic, social, and cultural aspects, emphasizing the importance of diversified land use and dense population. With technological advancements, research methods on urban vitality are increasingly diverse, particularly with the application of big data and geographic information systems providing new perspectives and tools for such studies. Currently, research on the vitality of inland Central Plains cities in China is relatively limited and largely confined to specific administrative areas, leading to an inadequate understanding of basic economic activities and population distribution within cities. Therefore, this study aims to explore the spatial distribution characteristics of urban vitality and its influencing factors in Zhengzhou’s main urban area, providing a scientific basis for urban planning and sustainable development. This study utilizes methods that include Densi graph curve analysis, the entropy method, and the multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model, integrating statistical data, geographic information, and remote sensing imagery of Zhengzhou in 2023. The MGWR model analysis reveals: (1) Urban vitality in Zhengzhou’s main urban area exhibits a concentric pattern, with high vitality at the center gradually decreasing toward the periphery, showing significant spatial differences in economic, population, and cultural vitality. (2) Various influencing factors positively correlate with urban vitality in the main urban area, but due to shortcomings in urban development strategies and planning, some factors negatively impact vitality in the central area while positively affecting vitality in peripheral areas. Based on these findings, this study provides relevant evidence and theoretical support for urban planning and sustainable development in Zhengzhou, aiding in the formulation of more effective urban development strategies.

Traditional villages contain rich natural and humanistic information, and exploring the spatial distribution characteristics and cultural landscape zoning of traditional villages can provide scientific support for their centralized and continuous protection and renewal and sustainable development. In this study, 326 traditional villages in the northern Henan region were taken as the research object, followed by analyzing their spatial distribution characteristics by using geostatistical methods, such as nearest-neighbor index, imbalance index, geographic concentration index, etc., combining the theory of cultural landscape to construct the traditional villages’ cultural factor index system, extracting the cultural factors of the traditional villages to form a database, and adopting the K-means clustering method to divide the region. The results show that the spatial distribution of traditional villages in northern Henan tends to be concentrated overall, with an uneven distribution throughout the region. The density is highest in the northwestern part of Hebi City and lower in the central and southern parts of Xinxiang City, Neihuang County, and Puyang City. Based on the cultural factor index system, the K-means algorithm divides the traditional villages in northern Henan into six clusters. Among them, the five cultural factors of topography and geomorphology, building materials, courtyard form, structural system, and altitude and elevation are the most significant, and they are the cultural factors that dominate the landscape of the villages. There is a significant correlation between topography, altitude, and other cultural factors, while the correlation between the street layout and other factors is the lowest. Based on the similarity between the clustering results and the landscape characteristics, the traditional villages in northern Henan can be divided into the stone masonry building culture area along the Taihang Mountains, the brick and stone mixed building culture area in the low hills of the Taihang Mountains, the brick and wood building culture area in the North China Plain, and the raw soil building culture area in the transition zone of the Loess Plateau.