1. By the end of this decade, the majority of people will live in cities and suburban areas. Urban areas, including suburbs and exurbs, are expanding rapidly worldwide. 2. Plant ecology has largely ignored cities, or has primarily focused on the discrete urban green spaces within cities. 3. Plant ecology is increasingly engaging urban ecosystems as integrated natural-human systems, in which hum...

the expansion of major cities regardless of the scientific planning principles has led to theemergence of negative urban development impacts in iran such as the degradation of natural resources andvarious forms of pollution. undoubtedly, urban rivers can enhance the ecological value of the earth to anoptimal extent. however, to benefit from these potentials, appropriate planning looks inevitabl...

The wildland–urban interface represents landscape change—changes brought about by urbanization, by shifts in forest management, and altered disturbance regimes, each having ecological, social, and economic ramifications. In this chapter, I will focus on some of the ecological ramifications associated with landscape change, primarily forest fragmentation and deforestation, resulting from urbaniz...

Green spaces in residential communities are important yet understudied features of the urban ecological system. While large urban parks and remnant wildlands in urban areas tend to receive public attention from conservation and management perspectives, less is known about the importance of spatial and ecological characteristics of the community-scale green space. This study investigates natural...

Rapid urbanization, land scarcity, and accompanying ecological deterioration in China have received growing attention. In this paper, two fast-growing metropolitan regions, Greater Shanghai and Greater Hangzhou, were selected as case studies to quantify the impact of land use/land cover (LULC) change on regional ecosystem services value (ESV) at the landscape scale since the late 1970s. The res...

Landscape changes associated with urbanization can lead to many serious ecological and environmental problems. Quantifying the vertical structure of the urban landscape and its change is important to understand its social and ecological impacts, but previous studies mainly focus on urban horizontal expansion and its impacts on land cover/land use change. This papers focuses on the residential l...

Sustainable designs like low-carbon landscapes are key to lowering the anthropogenic carbon footprint of our society and promoting harmony with natural ecosystems. We can design low-carbon landscapes for terrestrial (e.g. forests and urban farming areas) as well as aquatic (e.g. urban streams, ponds, and wetlands) urban spaces. Ecological interactions between water and soil in an urban ecosyste...

the notion of sustainable development has rapidly gained considerable attention since the lastdecades of the twentieth century. it has become a locus for global paradigm shift on environment and development issues particularly after rio conference in 1992. the comparative analysis of agenda 21 and major un documents, mdg, and rio+20 as well as some major sources are made to provide a context fo...

Study on landscape spatial pattern in the center of Chengdu City is based on the Landsat-8 image by using 3S technique and spatial pattern analysis software Fragstats 3.3. The results showed that there covered an area of 193.92 km2 in the center of Chengdu City. 55.24% of the total area was made up of buildings, covering an area of 107.12 km2, and the overall landscape of impervious ground-base...

1. The conservation of insects is not a priority for most urban dwellers, yet can be accomplished in urban settings by the careful design of urban nature. Our goal is to foster cross-talk between practitioners of insect conservation biology who develop the knowledge base and professional design practitioners who are poised to apply this knowledge in designs and management plans for urban green ...