Mapping Green View Index for Urban Parks with Varied Landscape Metrics and Distances toward the Chinese Eastern Railway Network

Abstract

The Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) has been identified as a heritage site that has witnessed industrial and social developments and changes over the past 100 years. Many old infrastructures have transitioned from civil use to historical conservation, but the spatial distributions and driving forces of ecosystem service functions provided by local ecological infrastructures are still unclear. The green view index (GVI) is a flexible parameter that measures the ratio of pixels accounted for by greeneries to those in an intact street view image; hence, it is widely recognized as a reliable variable for assessing the magnitude of ecosystem services provided by ecological infrastructures at a regional scale. In this study, a total of 42 urban parks were selected from regions covered by CER routes and adjacent cities without its involvement. No difference in GVI was found among cities regardless of distance from CER routes, and the distance of a park to the nearest CER line was found to have only indirect and negative effects on GVI. Correlation analysis indicated that the logarithms of both green and blue space areas had positive relationships with GVI. Regression analysis indicated that the logarithm of the blue space area, together with elevation and longitude, had positive effects on GVI, while latitude resulted in a negative effect. Overall, low GVI values (~6.0%) in the parks of Tsitsihar resulted from the effect of high closeness with the CER route, and high GVI values (over ~40%) in the parks of Changchun were indicated by the joint characteristics of local landscape metrics.