Abstract
People’s satisfaction towards the experience in forests is one of most important feedbacks that forest park managers need to meet positive visitors’ experiences. Although the drawbacks of questionnaire methodology are obvious for data collection from self-reported scores at the landscape scale, few alternative methods have been proposed. In this study, nine urban forest parks along the urbanization gradients in three capital cities of Northeast China were targeted to investigate their visitors’ selfies from social networking services (SNS) by assessing facial expressions. A total of 935 photos with location records were obtained from the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog in a social hot-event of ‘Golden Week Holidays of National Day of China’ of 2017. Images were recognized by FireFace software to assess scores of neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt expressions. Data were ranked in descending order and analyzed by Friedman’s test, correlation analysis, and Poisson regression. Visitors in downtown-forests showed fewer negative expressions at the most northern city than at the southern most one. The negative expressions tended to be alleviated with the increasing distance of forest parks from downtown. However, when the distance reached over 10 km no geographical effect was found. Female visitors showed positive emotional expressions to urban forests while male visitors showed no response. In conclusion, using data from SNS, this study found an experience in forest park less than 10 km from the downtown of a northern city resulted in female visitors showing the most positive expressions.
Highlights
Forests account for one of the largest green spaces in a city’s landscape
Harbin occurs at the northernmost side of our study area and our results suggest that visitors in urban forests of a northern city tended to show more positive emotion on their faces than those in forests at a southern city
Our studies revealed that visitors in the urban forest parks near the city center generally expressed more negative emotion and tended to show higher disgusted expressions
Summary
Forests account for one of the largest green spaces in a city’s landscape. The socioeconomic functions of forests have drawn more and more attention of contributions to restoration, leisure, recreation and aesthetics [1]. Forests can supply services to alleviate psychological depression and reduce mental stress for visitors, which has been taken as an important trait of modern forested landscapes [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. This effect was termed as “forest bathing”, i.e., spending some time for walking, viewing, and breathing in the forest atmosphere to gain restoration [2,10,11]. As urbanization is accelerating [21], large-scale forest management is more important to generate the forest bathing effect from rural and suburban regions, and in near-center forested lands
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