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Urban green spaces have been shown to benefit residents’ physical and mental health as well as strengthen social ties. Some studies have found that presence of vegetation also might reduce crime. We examined whether an association exists between two forms of green space–(1) tree canopy and (2) public parks–and crime rates in the city of Chicago. Using publicly available data, we calculated percent tree canopy, percent acreage parks, and crime rate for assault, battery, burglary, homicide, narcotics, and robbery between years 2009–2013 for each of Chicago’s 801 census tracts. We used general linear modeling to determine whether tree canopy and crime rates as well as park area and crime rates were correlated after accounting for socioeconomic variables and spatial autocorrelation. An inverse association was found between percent tree canopy and crime rates for assault, battery, robbery, and narcotics. No significant association was found between crime types analyzed, with the exception of burglary, and percent park acreage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewscapes are the visible portions of a landscape that create a visual connection between a human observer and their 3-dimensional surroundings. However, most large area line-of-sight studies have modeled viewscapes using bare-earth digital elevation models, which exclude the 3-D elements of built and natural environments needed to comprehensively understand the scale, complexity and naturalness of an area. In this study, we compared viewscapes derived from LiDAR bare earth (BE) and top-of-canopy (ToC) surface models for 1000 exurban homes in a region of the Rocky Mountains, USA that is experiencing rapid low-density growth. We examined the extent to which the vertical structure of trees and neighboring houses in ToC models – not accounted for in BE models – affect the size and quality of each home’s viewscape. ToC models consistently produced significantly smaller viewscapes compared to BE models across five resolutions of LiDAR-derived models (1, 5, 10, 15, and 30-m). As resolution increased, both ToC and BE models produced increasingly larger, exaggerated viewscapes. Due to their exaggerated size, BE models overestimated the greenness and diversity of vegetation types in viewscapes and underestimated ruggedness of surrounding terrain compared to more realistic ToC models. Finally, ToC models also resulted in more private viewscapes, with exurban residents seeing almost three times fewer neighbors compared to BE models. These findings demonstrate that viewscape studies should consider both vertical and horizontal dimensions of built and natural environments in landscape and urban planning applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]