【Objective】The perception of environmental safety significantly impacts users’ physical and mental well-being and is a key consideration in landscape design. Urban park waterfront spaces, being areas where the public congregates most and where a sense of insecurity is relatively easily experienced, merit special attention. Studying how the proportion and configuration of landscape elements in urban park waterfront spaces affect park users’ safety perception can provide theoretical support for safety-centered design of such spaces.【Method】Taking Nanjing’s Xuanwu Lake Park as a case, 66 sample segments of the waterfront space were selected. Sample photos were taken, landscape elements were classified, and the percentage of each element in the photos was calculated. Mathematical and statistical methods, such as Pearson correlation analysis, two-factor ANOVA, and multivariate linear regression, were used to analyze the coupling relationship between landscape elements and users’ sense of security in the waterfront space.【Result】(1) The landscape elements with the most significant positive impact on the sense of security in the waterfront space are the sky (0.571,P<0.01) and the waterfront fence (0.552,P<0.01), while those with the most significant negative impact are waterfront trees (-0.450,P<0.01) and waterfront shrubs/grass flowers (-0.357,P<0.01).(2) Waterfront plant elements interact with each other and with the sky element, jointly influencing the sense of security of waterfront space users.(3) Both the shade level in the waterfront space and the naturalness degree of the waterfront space have a significant negative impact on the safety perception score.(4) In different waterfront spaces with diverse human-water relationships, natural and artificial landscape elements have varying degrees of influence on the sense of security.【Conclusion】By categorizing landscape elements and analyzing their multiple coupling relationships with users’ sense of security, more connections between waterfront space landscape elements and users’ psychology were established. This is beneficial for proposing optimization suggestions for the landscape security of urban park waterfront spaces.