Due to a growing appreciation for the ecological and recreational benefits of public green spaces, the evaluation of urban parks’ service efficiency, as well as citizens’ behavioral preferences for daily recreation, have become an increasing academic focus. However, due to the lack of empirical approaches, existing research on exploring park service areas has been simplified by their use of Euclidean distance or buffer sets by simulation, ignoring the fact that the likelihood of citizens visiting urban parks is time sensitive. Utilizing mobile signaling data and web map services, this study proposes an approach to estimating the travel times of park visitors and analyzing the characteristics of park service areas from the perspective of actual time consumption. Taking Shanghai as a case study, this research firstly identified the time–cost decay of parks with different areas and locations. A comparison analysis was then used to examine the spatial relationship between park service areas and their accessibility defined by time consumption. The results show that (1) urban parks in Shanghai have larger mean service radii than existing planning guidelines, and park service areas were significantly influenced by park locations; (2) people have a great preference for urban parks whose travel times by public transit are under 40 min, and they have no desire to visit parks located within or outside the Middle Ring Road when the travel times reach 60 min and 75 min, respectively; (3) the shapes of park service areas are consistent with the high-accessibility districts defined by time thresholds, in spite of some differences caused by citizens’ choices. These findings provide an effective tool for evaluating the actual characteristics of park recreational services, along with direct implications for policymakers aiming to establish effective strategies for improving the accessibility and vitality of urban parks.

Using tourism as an instrument to reduce poverty is an increasingly common policy in developing countries. Based on a case study in China, this paper analyses the effects of tourism on the incomes of a poor community through the use of a survey replicating an earlier work in the same area supported by secondary data sets supplemented by observation. It was found that local households generally benefited from tourism development but may have over-estimated the extra income generated by tourism. The study also identified the existence of substantial barriers that inhibited a greater participation in tourism on the part of local people. One consequence is that the sought for increments to income are not being realised. Additionally, over time, evidence exists of a changing community assessment of the impact of tourism, and with experience of tourism those concerns become more holistic and not solely related to income generation.

The rapid growth of UAV use in urban logistics, infrastructure inspection, emergency response, and campus services has made low-altitude flights more common in residential environments. Previous studies have mainly examined aircraft acoustics, flight conditions, building transmission, or listener responses. Repeated field evidence on UAV noise under contrasting canopy-site configurations remains limited. This study compared UAV noise under low-canopy (15 m) conditions at a six-storey campus residential area with a regular row-type layout. The two focal sites had similar building layouts, façade conditions, measurement positions, flight altitudes, and source–receiver geometry. They differed mainly in tree height and canopy density. We tested a DJI Mavic 2 Pro and a DJI Matrice 200 V2 in three independent hovering trials for each condition. We measured sound levels using Class 1 sound level meters. We also compared indoor and outdoor exposure. The analysis included one-third-octave-band spectra from representative recordings, descriptive psychoacoustic indicators, 118 valid questionnaires, principal component analysis, and exploratory empirical Bayesian kriging based on 15 measurement points. At the outdoor focal sites, the Matrice 200 showed a L_ASmax 10.0 dB higher under the tall-canopy condition. Its L_Aeq was 2.7 dB higher, whereas its L₉₀ was 10.5 dB lower. This pattern indicates a wider, more intermittent sound-level distribution rather than a uniform increase. The Mavic 2 outdoor L_Aeq was 5.0 dB higher under the tall-canopy condition. Indoor differences varied by UAV model, window condition, and acoustic indicator. Higher transient sound levels and stronger psychoacoustic responses were associated with greater annoyance. EBK interpolation was used to visualize spatial heterogeneity. The assessment framework may also support studies in campus dormitory areas and row-layout multi-storey residential compounds with similar spatial features. The findings suggest that canopy-site configuration, building enclosure, UAV characteristics, and flight geometry should be assessed together.