Date of Award:

8-2026

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Committee Chair(s)

Brent Chamberlain

Committee

Brent Chamberlain

Committee

Ole Russell Sleipness

Committee

Huaqing Wang

Committee

Nate Trauntvein

Committee

Keunhyun Park

Abstract

Urban greenery is often used to understand the quality of living conditions in cities. However, measuring greenery is not always simple. Some methods show how much vegetation exists from above, while others try to show what people actually see while walking or moving through streets. These are different ways of understanding green space. This dissertation focuses on visible greenness, or the greenery that people can see from eye level in everyday urban environments.

This research addresses a practical problem. Many existing methods for measuring visible greenness require large image datasets, advanced computing, or commercial street-view images. These requirements can make the methods difficult to use in smaller cities, small towns, or places with limited technical resources. They can also be difficult to use in locations where street view imagery is incomplete, outdated, or unavailable.

The dissertation includes three connected studies. The first study reviewed previous research and clarified how urban green space has been measured. It showed that visible greenness should be understood as a distinct part of green space exposure because it represents what people see, not only what exists on a map. The second study tested how route-based visibility analysis can be made more efficient while still producing useful results. It showed that visible greenness can be measured along walking routes without always requiring the most detailed and time-consuming data settings. The third study compared a route-based visibility approach with street view-based greenness measures and found that the proposed method can provide a meaningful alternative.

Together, these studies show that visible greenness can be measured in a way that is clearer, more practical, and more scalable. This is important for planning practice because the method can be used along routes in cities or small towns when reliable public geospatial data, such as height and vegetation data provided by agencies like the United States Geological Survey, are available. This approach can create opportunities to measure greenness exposure even in places where street view imagery is not provided.

Checksum

62f72348cf4eb8f69da068c513b921db

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS

Copyright for this work is retained by the student. If you have any questions regarding the inclusion of this work in the Digital Commons, please email us at .