Organizing heritage-tree landscape-perception and CES representations in a historic district: A node-time-touchpoint approach.

Heritage banyan trees in rapidly urbanizing historic districts are ecological assets and landscape elements through which aesthetic appreciation, place meaning, and cultural memory are represented and communicated. Yet these perceptual and experiential dimensions are difficult to record and compare systematically because they are embedded in situated encounters and interpretive cues. Using Sanfang Qixiang in Fuzhou, China, this study develops a node-time-touchpoint approach to organize coded heritage-tree landscape-perception and cultural ecosystem services (CES) representations in a project-based interpretive corpus. The approach operationalizes time as T-context (temporal-thematic/narrative-use context) and combines N-T-C unitization, an operational CES indicator framework, six-dimensional CES representation scoring, mean-score profiles, a touchpoint-type evidence matrix, and an imagery encoding-return/convergence process. Based on 237 valid N-T-C records, the results show that aesthetic experience, recreation and leisure, and place identity and memory formed the most stable high-scoring CES dimensions, while spiritual symbolism, social relations, and education and interpretation varied more across temporal-thematic contexts and touchpoint types. Reliability and sensitivity checks, including independent subset recoding, threshold tests, and boundary-case exclusion, indicated that the dominant profile pattern and primary touchpoint patterns remained stable. The approach provides structured, corpus-based evidence for interpretation planning, touchpoint configuration, route organization, and conservation communication, while audience perception and management uptake require future validation.