Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and global environmental decline. With accelerated urbanization worldwide, it is essential to put in place new policies to conserve urban ecosystems, species and the services these provide in order to secure more sustainable, resilient and livable cities for the 21st century. In urban planning, the concept of resilience has broadly replaced the ...

(Semi-)natural ecosystems provide many important benefits to nature and people, but are often located near populated urbanized areas across the globe. During recreational activities, people bring dogs into peri-urban forests nature, their nutrient inputs per unit space time via dog faeces urine remain scarcely quantified. Here, we estimate net fertilization rates of in ecosystems, with a focus ...

Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The re...

Urban grasslands, landscapes dominated by turfgrasses for aesthetic or recreational groundcovers, are rapidly expanding in the United States and globally. These managed ecosystems are often less diverse than the natural or agricultural lands they replace, leading to potential losses in ecosystem functioning. Research in non-urban systems has provided evidence for increases in multiple ecosystem...

Intelligent or smart cities rely on collaboration networks among human communities, innovation ecosystems, and digital infrastructure, applications and e-services, which enable the urban challenges of competitiveness, sustainability and inclusion to be addressed more efficiently. This urban paradigm is characterized by continuous transformation, fuelled by evolutions in innovation ecosystems, b...

Urban futures that are more resilient and sustainable require an integrated social-ecological system approach to urban policymaking, planning, management, and governance. In this article, we introduce the Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (URBES) and the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO) Projects as new social-ecological contributions to research and practice on emerging urban resil...

Most urban ecology in cities remains an “ecology in cities” rather than an “ecology of cities.” Accomplishing the latter requires the inclusion of humans within the concept of “ecosystem,” both how humans alter the properties of urban ecosystems and how these alterations in turn influence human well-being. These influences are both direct (e.g., physiological and psychological influences on the...