The Role of Landscape Context, Management Intensity, and Vegetation Heterogeneity in Shaping Urban Park Multifunctionality – A Case Study of Chengdu

Abstract

Infrastructure Urban parks are very essential elements of green infrastructure, which provide various ecosystems services such as regulation of microclimates, sequestration of carbon, preservation of biodiversity, and recreation. But the size itself does not dictate the performance of parks. The paper examines the potential of the trio of linked aspects landscape context, management intensity, and vegetation heterogeneity to collectively influence urban park multifunctionality in Chengdu, a fast-urbanizing subtropical mega city. A stratified 3 x 3 x 3 sampling design was applied to categorize the parks by gradients of impervious cover surrounding maintenance intensity surrounding the park and vegetation diversity giving the 60 representative parks under 19 functional combinations. Multifunctionality has been measured based on the cooling intensity, storage of carbon, biodiversity, and recreational value. Spatial autocorrelations were studied with the help of the Morans I, and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) were used to measure both global and local drivers. Findings show that vegetation heterogeneity is the most significant positive predictor of multifunctionality (β = 4.04, p < 0.001), which has a significant positive impact on biodiversity and cooling capacity. However, the management intensity exhibits a strong negative correlation (β = −0.058, p < 0.001), which indicates the theory of making ecological trade-offs in the intensive maintenance regimes. Independent effects of park area and surrounding impervious cover are weaker than internal composition when internal composition is taken into consideration. Multifunctionality is highly clustered in space, which is mainly identified using spatial analysis, and GWR is seen to enhance the model performance (Adjusted R² = 0.78) considerably by capturing the local variation. The results have shown that, urban park multifunctionality develops as a result of interaction between inner ecological complexity and urban pressures instead of park size. Improving the vegetation diversity and moderated and spatially differentiated management approaches especially in densely populated areas can significantly aid in delivering ecosystem services. The suggested stratified and spatially explicit model offers a generalizable model towards the optimization of urban park planning in fast developing urban areas.

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