Enhancing climate adaptation through urban park planning: Modelling high-temperature visitation patterns via big data in Beijing

Amid the acceleration of global warming and urbanization, summer heat has become a critical climate hazard that constrains outdoor recreation in megacities. By leveraging high-resolution spatiotemporal mobility data alongside meteorological station observations, we estimate linear mixed effects and quantile regression models to quantify the influences of multiple high-temperature metrics on visits to 234 parks of diverse typologies within the Beijing Sixth Ring Road. High temperatures are shown to decrease park visits by 11–19%. However, once the air temperature exceeds 35 °C, the marginal deterrent effect of heat duration attenuates, indicating a phenomenon of desensitization. Historical and ecological parks, together with weekday visitation, exhibit pronounced rigidity and display limited sensitivity, whereas community, comprehensive and specialized parks and weekend park visits are markedly heat responsive. These findings highlight the scope for urban planning interventions to strengthen thermal resilience. Fostering increased clustering and edge complexity for green space while tempering its connectivity, expanding the proportion of blue space, implementing time-of-day operational zoning in heat-sensitive parks, and providing seamless linkages between parks, shopping malls and metro stations can collectively mitigate heat-induced declines in park use.