Straw man or scaffolding? Building the foundations of urban ecology: a reply to McDonnell et al
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چکیده
have already developed an array of more refined tools to quantify the integrated social and biophysical structure within urban mosaics [10], and to better understand the subtle roles of urban social processes and recognize new modes of social differentiation [11]. We also believe that coarse-scale aggregated measures have an even more critical role to play in urban ecological studies owing to the broad variety of urban conditions now evolving across the globe. Aggregated variables place individual studies into spatial and temporal context [9]. As surrogates for environmental conditions in time and space, aggregated variables do limit the interpretation of urbanization gradients, and must be used in conjunction with more specific question-driven measures of the demographic, physical, chemical and historical characteristics of the study sites. However, categorically dismissing aggregated variables (e.g. population density) is unproductive as these may still have an important role in providing a spatiotemporal context and in addressing a subset of key urban ecology research questions. Contemporary urban ecology already uses both aggregate and specific variables, acknowledges the dynamism and rapid evolution of urban areas, and exploits the power of gradients to abstract the mosaic complexity of urban regions.
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