To explore the effects of different types of forest environments for forest therapy, this study focused on forest resting environments. Seven representative forest resting environments found in field research in Beijing were used as independent variables and were shown to subjects by a virtual reality (VR) video. Stress level was used as the dependent variable, and blood pressure, heart rate, salivary amylase, and the Brief Profile of Mood States (BPOMS) were used as physiological and psychological indicators. A between-subjects design was used in the experiment. A total of 96 subjects were randomly assigned to each environment type, and only one type of forest resting environment was observed. Through the relevant sample t-test and one-way analysis of variance, the pre- and post-test data of the indicators were analyzed. This study found that all the seven different types of forest resting environments can produce stress relief effects to some extent. Different types of forest resting environments have different effects on relieving stress. The most natural environment does not have the most significant effect on stress relief. A water landscape has a positive effect on the relief of stress. The conclusions of this study are conducive to the better use of the forest environment for forest therapy services.

In this study, we aimed to implement information obtained and refined from garden elements in heritage conservation, monitoring, and management to precisely construct an information model of classical Chinese gardens, including information on the garden entity, garden space, and garden attributes, etc., and to improve the management efficiency of classical Chinese royal gardens. Three-dimensional laser scanning technology and point cloud information were used to accurately collect and process digital information from classical Chinese royal gardens. After classifying and processing the point cloud data, correlations therein could be further assessed and used to greatly improve the accuracy and management efficiency of spatial information. To provide a more convenient solution for the subsequent conservation and management of landscape heritage, a method for establishing a three-dimensional digital information database and a full life-cycle application management platform for classical Chinese royal gardens is proposed in this research. This method has broad applications for the digital conservation and management of cultural heritage.

With population ageing being a notable demographic phenomenon, aging in place is an efficient model to accommodate the mounting aging needs. Based on the community scale, this study takes the 15-min community-life circle as the basic research unit to investigate the imbalanced distribution of pension resources and its influencing factors in downtown Shanghai. We obtained six types of elderly care facilities data from the Shanghai elderly care service platform and utilized the Gaussian 2-step Floating Catchment Area method to calculate the accessibility of 6-type elderly care facilities. Then, we used the Entropy Weight Method to calculate the comprehensive accessibility of elderly care facilities. The Getis–Ord Gi* method was adopted to analyze the overall distribution, identifying the well-developed and the under-developed areas. To explore the influencing factors of the distribution, this paper obtained multi-source data to construct a total of 17 indicators and established a Random Forest model to identify the feature importance. With the selected eight factors, the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model was applied to study the spatial heterogeneity of influencing factors, and the model showed a good performance with the AdjR² being 0.8364. The findings of this research reveal the following: (1) The distribution of six types of elderly care facilities is extremely uneven, with obvious spatial aggregation characteristics. Amongst the seven administrative regions, Huangpu District has the best accessibility to pension resources, while the resources in the other six regions are highly inadequate. (2) Essential influencing factors of the comprehensive accessibility of community-based elderly care facilities are accessibility of nursing institutions (positive), hotel density (positive), catering density (negative), education density (positive) and medical density (negative), while “rents”, “plot ratio” and “building density” have little impact on comprehensive accessibility. (3) The results of GWR revealed that the eight indicators are heterogeneous in space, all of which have bidirectional effects on comprehensive accessibility. By investigating the spatial distribution patterns and influencing factors of pension resources in Shanghai, this research could further contribute to establishing a sound community-based elderly care service system that improves older adults’ quality of life and promotes social fairness and justice.

Research on historic preservation zones (HPZs) has recently attracted increasing attention from academia and industry. With eight Beijing typical HPZs selected, this study evaluates critical vitality characteristics and identifies the key influencing factors via multi-source data and machine learning technology. The vitality characteristics were identified from three dimensions: physical space vitality, cyberspace vitality, and sentiment degree. For influencing factors, 23 variables were constructed from four aspects (morphological, functional, visual, and traffic) using Computer Vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Then, three vitality dimensions were introduced as responsive variables to establish three Random Forest Regression models. Lastly, each factor’s influence degree and direction on vitality were explained based on the feature importance and correlation analysis. Through this study, we have thoroughly examined the different influencing factors of vitality in HPZs and summarized the following academic findings: (1) Density of road intersections, the number of shops, and road impedance are the three of the most significant influencing factors that are negatively related to vitality. (2) Factors that have the highest impact on the sentiment degree are road impedance and the number of public infrastructures, which also negatively affect the population’s satisfaction. (3) The number of catering and entertainment amenities are critical factors that positively affect cyberspace’s vitality. In this study, all three models have adequately explained variables and generalization capability, which can be applied to other larger HPZs in Beijing. In addition, the findings of this study can also potentially provide insights for enhancing precinct vitality and the governance of HPZs in other cities.

Scientific identification of ecological sources and corridors is crucial in constructing an ecological security pattern (ESP). To develop an ESP tailored to the scale of central urban areas in megacities, this study takes Central Beijing as the research object. It innovatively integrates the integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST), the morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), and the Conefor software to identify ecological sources. Seven indicators related to topographic, natural conditions, and human disturbance factors are selected to build the ecological resistance surface, which is then combined with circuit theory to construct the ESP. The results show the following: (1) Central Beijing contains 157 ecological sources, primarily distributed in the western, northern, and eastern regions, with woodland as the dominant land type. (2) A total of 439 ecological corridors were extracted, including 317 key ecological corridors and 122 inactive ecological corridors. (3) The identified ecological pinch points are mainly the Jingmi Diversion Canal and the West Moat. (4) The identified ecological barriers are spread throughout the entire study area. The results of this study are highly significant for improving the quality of ecological security and protecting biodiversity in the study area and other urban centers.