Advancing Research in Landscape, Ecology, and Built Environments
The Landscape Architecture stands as a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the study of landscapes, built environments, ecological systems, and cultural space. The journal provides a scholarly platform for researchers, designers, planners, engineers, conservation specialists, and academics working across landscape architecture, architecture, environmental science, engineering, arts and humanities, and nature and landscape conservation.
- Authoritative Research: We publish rigorously peer-reviewed articles covering landscape architecture theory, urban and rural landscapes, ecological restoration, green infrastructure, heritage landscapes, public spaces, environmental planning, landscape engineering, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable design.
- Interdisciplinary Scholarship: Readers benefit from original research, critical reviews, case studies, design research, and methodological papers that connect landscape, ecology, architecture, culture, infrastructure, and environmental stewardship.
- Global Academic Reach: Publishing one volume with four issues each year, released in March, June, September, and December, the journal provides a respected platform for scholars and professionals worldwide to share research findings, critical perspectives, and applied knowledge.
- Open Access Advantage: As a diamond open access journal, Landscape Architecture makes all articles freely available online. Authors retain copyright under the CC BY 4.0 license, and no article processing charges, submission fees, publication fees, or DOI fees are required.
The Landscape Architecture is abstracted, indexed, archived, or listed in leading databases and discovery platforms, including Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents / Arts & Humanities, Scilit, Google Scholar, Dimensions, JSTOR, EBSCO, and ROAD. Each article receives a unique DOI. We welcome scholars to submit manuscripts as email attachments to the editorial office at: editassist@landscarchitmag.org.
Latest Articles
- Research article
- Volume 116 (Issue 2)
- Pages: 37
- - 53
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20261162-03
Green-roof inventories for municipalities should be able to discriminate between confirmed roofs greening and vegetation intersecting building footprints. It is true especially for Lisbon with historical red clay roofs, flat individual roofs, trees on the borders of streets, and communal podium-type green spaces in a dense urban fabric. This paper investigates whether Lisbon’s candidate inventory reflects the condition which should be prioritized for field validation when the accuracy of image-class classification is high but the object assignment differs by morphology. The dataset consists of an eight-band WorldView-2 image obtained on 18 February 2022, twelve observations made monthly with Sentinel-2 in 2023, 54,800 municipality building footprints, 4,015 grouped-building detections, 371 final candidates, and 196 verified green roofs. The investigation follows five-stage procedure that is built into the Lisbon record: class-specific reliability of the image classification, successive elimination, beta-binomial posterior credibility, seasonal NDVI margins, and inspection burden distribution. The classification audit of the WorldView-2 image is quite successful as evidenced by the overall accuracy value of 0.950, Cohen’s κ of 0.914, vegetation F1 of 0.960, and unsuitable-roof F1 of 0.947. These numbers confirm the greenness and materials-based screening but not the roof attribution. Validation of the objects is very typologically specific: 50 out of 176 individual-roof candidates pass the test, versus 146 out of 195 shared space candidates. The verification odds for the shared space path are 7.51 higher than for the individual-building path, and the reliability-adjusted posterior intervals stay well-separated. The seasonal NDVI discriminates the two types too, since top-level roofs span 0.25-0.31 margins around the 0.30 gate, while shared space roofs are located above the gate at 0.32-0.49. In summary, Lisbon’s candidate map includes two separate streams of verification: individual roofs need specific error detection while common space roofs present the high yielding approach to completion of the city’s inventory.
- Research article
- Volume 116 (Issue 2)
- Pages: 19
- - 36
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20261162-02
Where high-albedo roofs and pavements reduce the amount of heat absorption through solar rays, the annual residential-energy implications will depend on whether the home appliances used are electric-powered cooling, gas space heating or heat pumps. The key issue here is how the 15–30% neighborhood high-albedo application should be interpreted, where air-temperature reliability is strongest under specific conditions and the same housing stock has both cooling and heating technology overlap. Seasonal Reversal–Technology Allocation Sizing (SRTAS) analysis is employed using the following numerical examples: temperatures for Los Angeles and Seattle in terms of validation quantities; Pacoima treated-area high-albedo impact; demand for cooling reduced by albedo and cool roofs; and a 89-home Los Angeles County residential-equipment inventory data set. The residential equipment data set involves 58 homes using electric cooling, 53 using gas heating, 40 using electric cooling and gas heating, and 6 using heat-pump cooling and heating. Los Angeles offers 25.7% contraction in near-surface air-temperature MAE at all hours and 32.4% in the highest built-volume cells. On the other hand, Seattle offers modest contraction in all hours, although it achieves 30.3% contraction in MAE during the hottest hour, thus creating a hot-tail concentration of 4.04. The 15–30% albedo range offers approximately 0.0107 °C cooling per treated-area percentage point while the 30% albedo plus cool-roof case results in an 11% reduction in the increase in cooling demand, hence avoiding 57.9% of the warming-induced increment. It changes the claim that technology allocation: gas-heating exposure 0.923 relative to electric-cooling exposure; non-heat-pump reversal pressure 0.815 and heat-pump exposure 0.108. The research data confirm heat adaptation and cooling demand reduction, but not any unconditional annual energy savings statement, unless cool roof envelope advantages and heat pump conversion are mentioned in the same context in one claim.
- Research article
- Volume 116 (Issue 2)
- Pages: 1
- - 18
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20261162-01
Historic centers tend to be appreciated due to symbolism and architecture; meanwhile, their regular users interact with them through effort, heat, surface, seating, signposting, landscaping maintenance, and opportunity to stop during the trip. Bursa’s historic center is studied as an open corridor combining heritage, business, arrival via transport, and urban routine of Green Tomb, Setbaşı, Heykel, Historical Hans District, Tophane, National Garden, Reşat Oyal Culture Park, and adjacent streets. The data includes 250 users and four indices: Need-Conversion Ordering, Affordance–Demand Imbalance, Neutrality Retention Screening, and Adequacy–Satisfaction Divergence. Satisfaction, adequacy, demand, reliability, demographic, access-mode, duration of stay, and activity data are used in combination to rank public realm support. The prolonged and transit-related nature of use makes the interpretation of results different from planning one. In total, 69.20% of respondents were staying for more than two hours and 44.40% arrived by bus or minibus; therefore, the corridor should be seen in terms of pedestrian connectivity after arrival. The maximum need conversion is provided by green connectivity and rest in the shade (58.28), followed by connectivity and universally available route (52.18). The biggest gap between afforded and demanded features is green connectivity (61.53), followed by accessibility (57.34), and tourism interpretation (50.32). The equipment and maintenance is the index with the highest neutrality retention weight (3.67); meanwhile, comfort and image are indices with the highest adequacy-satisfaction divergence (26.69). Therefore, the historic center of Bursa should be developed first in terms of long-term, walkable, shady, and accessible public realm corridor; meanwhile, interpretive and identity-related efforts will work once this framework is set up.
- Research article
- Volume 116 (Issue 1)
- Pages: 90
- - 103
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20261161-06
In the case of nature-based vitality, there can be metrics such as quantity of green areas, park availability, or temporary increase in outdoor activities. All of the above approaches have some merit. Yet, they can conflate the temporary impact on visual attention with sustainable changes that will become visible after new routines have been formed. This paper introduces SARSE and applies it to Vancouver data from 2018 to 2023 in order to distinguish between temporary disruption-related reactions and persistent activity patterns as well as environmental and perceptual factors associated with both of them and with meaningful spatial structure. There is an extensive record of annually counted numbers of observations per each image-derived activity category, Moran’s \(I\), variance inflation values, and visitation correlations for Vancouver. The temporal component takes into account pre-disruption 2018-2019 state, 2020 shock effect ratio, persistent 2022-2023 period, terminal memory of 2023 year and volatility. The spatial readiness component encompasses spatial autocorrelation, multicollinearity handling and positive correlation with visitation counts. Urban Elements and Artistic Expression achieved the largest persistently observed expansion from \(B_g=269.5\) up to 4427 observations in 2023 years and attained \(A_g=2.54\) as well. Life and Cultural Activities, Street Landscapes and Life Scenes, Natural Landscapes and Greenery, Urban Built Form and Public Realm and Traffic categories have remained above the pre-disruption level. Flowers and Plants showed the largest 2020 shock ratio (\(S_g=8.50\)) but maintained rather weak 2023 memory (\(M_g=0.18\)). Sentiment Score and Red Maple provided the highest visitation-weighted spatial-readiness score, followed by Number of Parks, Pyramidal European Hornbeam, Tree Height 40-50 and Park Area factors.
- Research article
- Volume 116 (Issue 1)
- Pages: 74
- - 89
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20261161-05
The analysis of urban soil health should facilitate decision-making concerning park management, de-sealing, urban forestry, stormwater management, carbon sequestration, and restoration of disturbed soil. Therefore, any analysis of urban soil health requires measurements that reflect chemical, physical, biological aspects, sampling depth, and ecological services associated with urban soils. In this regard, we performed the analysis of urban soil health based on a calculation of a Depth–Function Coupling Portfolio of selected 63 out of 217 papers. The dataset used in this work included data about 61 geographical samples, 59 samples characterized by land use and 51 samples described in terms of their sampling depths. Chemical aspects were reported in 76% of the publications, physical – in 60%, biological – in 44%, soil health indexes – in 37%, and ecosystem services – in 33%. Among land use categories, the greatest number of cases refers to open space (32), park (26), and residential land use (23). Among vegetation types, grass has the largest frequency (48), followed by trees (23) and shrubs (15). Moreover, vertical sampling is limited in more than 70% of samples, where sampling was made not deeper than 20 cm. Only two studies considered soil samples obtained deeper than 120 cm. Soil function coverage index equals 0.507, depth awareness index equals 0.457, the score reflecting the disjunction between soil functions and depth equals 0.469, while the portfolio stress equals 0.500. Ecosystem service proxies have the highest contribution into total measurement deficit (26.8%), followed by soil health indexes (25.2%) and biological measurements (22.4%). Raising the proportion of biological and ecological services covered by urban soil research to 0.60 would increase the soil function coverage index to 0.637. Combined with the depth adequacy value of 0.50, this value will increase depth-awareness index to 0.607 and portfolio stress to 0.284.