Variations in landscape features and user evaluations at viewing points across different urban green spaces

As urbanization accelerates, opportunities for residents to interact directly with natural environments have gradually declined. Window views have therefore become an important channel through which urban residents visually perceive green landscapes. Taking the window-view perspective as the point of entry, this study incorporates the distance-height (D/H) theory into the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework to examine how users perceive and evaluate urban green landscapes from different viewing positions. The study was conducted in three parks of different categories in Shenyang, a representative city in northeastern China. Photographs were taken continuously at distance intervals of 50 m and height intervals of 10 m, resulting in a total of 300 photographs that were subjected to semantic segmentation analysis. In addition, nine photographs representing combinations of three distance gradients (50, 200, and 500 m) and three height gradients (20, 60, and 100 m) were selected to evaluate changes in users’ perceptual evaluations. The results of the analysis demonstrate three main findings. First, viewing position significantly influenced the visible proportions of landscape elements such as plants, water, and buildings, while distance and height showed opposite directional effects on these elements. Second, space perception score declined as viewing distance increased; in contrast, space perception score increased with greater viewing height. Third, landscape elements influenced perceived landscape value through both space perception scores and scenic beauty estimation, with space perception scores playing a central role. The findings enrich the application of D/H theory in window-view research and extend the explanatory scope of the S-O-R framework in studies of perceptual evaluation and landscape-related behavioral responses. The results also provide theoretical and practical references for optimizing urban green space design and improving residents’ landscape preferences.