Landscape Preferences of Recreational Walkways in Urban Green Spaces: Bada Shanren Meihu Scenic Area, China

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Abstract
Urban greenway trails serve as a vital link between urban populations and the natural environment, playing a key role in enhancing quality of life and promoting physical and mental well-being. We propose an interpretable machine learning framework applied to 424 geotagged footprint images from the Bada Shanren Meihu Scenic Area in China. Our main findings are as follows: (1) The key factors influencing trail landscape preferences include the Water Visibility Index (WVI), Building Landscape Index (BVI), Freedom Index, and Greenery Visibility Index (GVI). (2) For WVI, SHAP values significantly increase around the 0.05 threshold. BVI has a critical threshold of 0.17, with a strong influence below it and a reduced effect above it. The Freedom variable shows an inverse relationship, with minimal contribution below 0.21 and a sharp increase above this threshold. GVI maintains high SHAP values at lower levels (GVI ≤ 0.66), but its predictive utility decreases at higher values. (3) Landscape preferences are significantly positively correlated with naturalness, wildness, WVI, and openness, with water landscapes being the strongest driver. In contrast, artificial factors, V_Low, and H_Purple significantly suppress preferences. This suggests that human intervention and certain color tones may reduce the attractiveness of the landscape.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (52268012, 51968026)
  • 76th batch of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2024M761227)
  • Grant C of the National Postdoctoral Researchers Program (GZC20240621)
  • The General Project Funding for Philosophy and Social Sciences Research in Jiangsu Universities (2023SJYB1917)

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