Relationships between urban open spaces and humans’ health benefits from an ecological perspective: a study in an urban campus

The rapid increase in urban population worldwide is one among the important global environmental issues. The urban ecological system is made up of human society and environments. We cannot exclude humans from the urban ecosystem since humans are an integral component of landscape ecology. Bridging humans and landscape ecology is important to sustainable landscape planning and management from a holistic point of view. Humans’ responses to landscape structure are crucial to understand the relationships between humans and nature. In current study, we conducted a field experiment in an urban campus to investigate the relationships between urban open spaces and humans’ health benefits. The landscape structure of urban open spaces were derived from land cover maps. The results show that people’s psycho-physiological responses are correlated with selected landscape metrics of different land cover types. Overall, dense trees and large artificial structures likely have negative effects on humans, while large continuous grassland patches or water patches enhance humans’ positive responses. The findings give some insights into the design and management of urban open spaces that are favorable for ecosystems and the health of urban population. The methodology taken to investigate the relationships between landscape structure and human health in this study may be of value to future efforts in establishing healthy and sustainable urban environments.