This study reviews recreational ecosystem services from 2005 to 2020, focusing on the concepts and contents of recreational ecosystem services in China and abroad, organizing research methods, and summarizing research gaps and future perspectives. The results show that the concept of recreational ecosystem services is a general term that can encompass many previous tourism-related concepts, and is applicable to region-wide studies. Existing research on recreational ecosystem services focuses on three dimensions: “Supply: quality and value”, “Demand: recreationist preferences and demand forecasting”, and “Trade-offs: supply and demand, mathematics and interest subjects”. The current research results on “Supply” are abundant and involve multiple approaches, but the exploration of “Demand” and “Trade-offs” is insufficient, lacking a systematic and holistic conceptual and classification system. Therefore, based on the review, this study proposes to expand the connotation of recreational ecosystem services Value from the concept, expand the universality of related research from the object, deepen the formation mechanism from the content, strengthen the value measurement and the use of multi-source data from the method. Furthermore, the paper proposes to translate the theoretical research results into policy management measures and planning design tools in concrete practice, so as to guide sustainable development and promote the benefits of natural ecosystems.

The authors take Guangzhou South China Botanical Garden and Yuexiu Park as examples to analyze the emotional perception characteristics of urban park users, and explore the influencing factors and driving mechanisms of urban park users’ emotional perception based on the structural equation model. The results show that the positive emotions of park users are relatively high, but positive emotions and negative emotions exist independently. For coarse-grained emotions, landscape elements have direct and indirect influences on emotions. For fine-grained emotions, landscape elements mainly affect users’ fine-grained emotions by forming landscape functions. In different types of parks, there are differences in the factors and mechanisms that affect users’ different types of emotions and different granular emotions. This results can propose targeted improvements to the planning and design of parks, and provide a certain reference for the research on user emotional perception in other types of urban spaces.

Ecological regionalization research in China were focused on large scales and based on natural conditions, which is unable to provide practical suggestions for rural development. In this study, the classification of natural landscape governance unit framework was proposed in Wusheng County with cluster analysis, which may serve as the basis in planning. Three variables were considered in the analysis—30 m elevation, slope and land use, which were used in a Two Step Cluster analysis to define landscape types. According to results, Wusheng County can be divided into seven kinds of landscape governance units. The internal geographic features of the unit are similar, and the differences between the groups are significant. Three different governance modes can be defined: single town, single village and complex village. Analyzing the causes and proposing governance strategies is necessary for complex villages. The development strategy of the seven built-up areas of Wusheng are proposed.

Ecosystem service has become a hotspot of research and application since the concept has been put forward, particularly on the tradeoff research, which provides a scientific process for rational decision-making among multiple stakeholders based upon a thorough understanding of relationships among varied ecosystem services. Focusing on practical applications, this paper attempts to sum up specific application and practical values of ecosystem service tradeoff research based upon a detailed review of different investigation approaches and methods. The tradeoffs among ecosystem services can be summed up in four categories: mathematical supply tradeoffs, supply-demand tradeoffs, stakeholder tradeoffs and time/space tradeoffs. The quantitative method used involves objective and subjective measures. The four tradeoff types have been applied to different processes of planning/management practices, including goal setting, core area delineation, ecological compensation and public participation. On the basis of the review, this paper proposes a framework for planning application of ecosystem service tradeoffs while highlighting those existing limitations and providing recommendations for future work including data sharing, method simplification, process crossing, fine scale and the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods to further facilitate the implementation of ecosystem service tradeoff research in practice.