Urban parks provide multiple non-material benefits to human health and well-being; measuring these “intangible” benefits mainly co-produced by the spatial interactivity between dwellers and urban parks is vital for urban green space management. This paper introduced “vitality” to measure the intangible benefits of urban parks and constructed a straightforward and spatially explicit approach to assess the park vitality based on visiting intensity and recreational satisfaction rate. Freely available data of check-in comments on parks, points-of-interest (POIs), and other multi-source data from Beijing were used to assess the urban park vitality and explore the factors influencing it from the perspectives of recreational service supply, demand, and spatial linking characteristics. We found that the urban park vitalities decreased along the urban–rural gradient. The presence of water and facility density in the parks have significant positive impacts on park vitality, and high population density nearby was a positive factor. Moreover, the external higher levels of the POI-based urban function mix and density, as well as developed public transportation, were strongly associated with greater park vitality. Our research proposed a feasible and effective method to assess the park vitality, and the findings from this study have significant implications for optimizing the spatial configuration of urban parks.

Inter‐basin water transfer projects (IBWTPs) offer one of the most important means to solve the mismatch between supply and demand of regional water resources. IBWTPs have impacts on the complex ecosystems of the areas from which water is diverted and to which water is received. These impacts increase damage or risk to regional ecological security and human wellbeing. However, current methods make it difficult to achieve comprehensive analysis of the impacts of whole ecosystems, because of the long distance between ecosystems and the inconsistency of impact events. In this study, a model was proposed for the analysis of the impacts of IBWTPs on regional ecological security. It is based on the telecoupling framework, and the Driver‐Pressure‐State‐ Impact‐Response (DPSIR) model was used to improve the analysis procedure within the telecoupling framework. The Middle Line of the South‐to‐North Water Diversion Project was selected as a case study to illustrate the specific analysis procedure. We realized that information sharing is a key issue in the management of regional security, and that the ecological water requirement, in the form of a single index, could be used to quantitatively assess the impacts on ecological security from IBWTPs.

Ecological security assessment aims at identifying an ecosystem’s stability, recognizing the ability to maintain ecological health under various scenarios of ecological risks. In this study, we focus on the ecological security of Liao River Basin not only in terms of directly considering the sustainable development of the basin itself but also in terms of its importance as part of an ecological macro-control for northeast China. We built a “structure-quality-process” analytical framework to assess the ecological security of Liao River Basin. Our results showed that (i) land conversion from cultivated to artificial surfaces represented a dramatic change occurring in the region; (ii) the requirements of regional sustainable development would not likely be satisfied in regard to the given ecosystem services provided by the basin due to poor spatial coordination capability; and (iii) the priority areas for optimizing the ecological security patterns of the basin include the upstream and the downstream regions. The “structure-quality-process” assessment framework provides a dynamic perspective of ecological security and also considers the relationships and functions of the internal structures and processes of the ecosystem. The optimization of ecosystem structures and processes is essential and forms the basic measures and key content of macro-control for well-structured ecological security patterns.