A Green Synergy Index for Urban Green Space Assessment Based on Multi-Source Data Integration

Current assessments of urban green spaces (UGS) rely largely on two-dimensional (2D) indicators, which fail to capture the three-dimensional (3D) structure necessary for evaluating ecological functions and human exposure. Among these, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) describes top-down canopy greenness from a nadir perspective, whereas the Green View Index (GVI) quantifies vegetation visibility at street level from a pedestrian perspective. Because the relationship between NDVI and GVI remains unclear, multi-indicator assessments become difficult to interpret, limiting their ability to jointly characterize urban greenery. To address these gaps, we develop a synergy framework that integrates remote sensing with street-view images. First, we aligned the observation scales through street-view depth estimation and converted NDVI into fractional vegetation cover (FVC) through nonlinear mapping to unify measurement units. Correlation experiments revealed that the consistency between GVI and FVC was weak across the city (R² = 0.27) but substantially stronger along arterial roads with continuous vegetation (R² = 0.61). On this basis, we design a Green Synergy Index (GSI) that combines FVC and GVI using fractional power-law adjustments and an interaction term to capture their joint effects. Robustness tests indicate that GSI effectively handles extreme or mismatched cases, differentiates greening patterns, and integrates complementary information from nadir and street views without numerical instability. Furthermore, we assess the consistency between GSI and land surface temperature (LST), showing that the proposed index improves explanatory power compared with FVC and GVI alone (by 5.6% and 8.8%, respectively). Application to the study area yields a mean GSI value of 0.44 on a 0–1 scale, with spatial variations closely associated with road geometry and functional zoning. This enables the identification of mismatched canopy and visibility segments and supports targeted, climate-sensitive green infrastructure planning.