Achieving better understanding phosphorus (P) flows through urban ecosystems is needed to conserve P, as non-renewable phosphate rock deposits become depleted and the global human population increases. A baseline mass flow analysis (MFA) for P developed for the Twin Cities Watershed (TCW, which includes most of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan region) showed that most P input was stored in...

Eduardo Rojas is a Senior Urb an Planner with the Inter-American Development Bank, supervising the bank's urban deve lopment portfolio. H e is currently desig ning several urban h eritag e preservation and revitalization loans and technical coop erations. He is task manager f or the Quito Historic Center Rehabilitation Loan granted to Ecuador. His degrees are in architecture, urban planning, an...

Functional diversity is increasingly pointed as a useful approach to reach Biological Conservation goals. Here, we provide an overview of the functional diversity approach status in the Biological Conservation field. We sought for peer-reviewed papers published over a period of twenty years (from 1994 to 2014). First we used the general topic "functional diversity" and then refined our search u...

Conservation of private land through conservation easements, development agreements, and clustered housing has increased greatly as have criticisms of the laws, public programs, and incentives that motivate landowners to use them. Rapid land-use change at the urban-rural interface in Larimer County, Colorado, has given rise to programs that provide a variety of land-conservation options for lan...

This research simulates the urban growth and therefore the landscape change of a mountain city of Chongqing, China through a Cellular Automata (CA) based model of SLEUTH. The fundamental data were four Landsat TM images of 1978, 1988, 1993, and 2001 which were utilized for generating maps of land use, road networks, and urbanized area. Three alternative development scenarios, including business...

A methodology is developed to relate urban growth studies to distributed hydrological modeling using an integrated approach of remote sensing and GIS. This linkage is possible because both studies share land-use and land-cover data. Landsat Thematic Mapper data are utilized to detect urban land-cover changes. GIS analyses are then conducted to examine the changing spatial patterns of urban grow...

Biodiversity loss is a matter of great concern among conservation scientists, but the wherewithal to reverse this trend is generally lacking. One reason is that nearly half of the world's people live in urban areas and are increasingly disconnected from nature. If there is to be broad-based public support for biodiversity conservation, the places where people live and work should be designed so...

Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

Rapid urbanization has become an area of crucial concern in conservation owing to the radical changes in habitat structure and loss of species engendered by urban and suburban development. Here, we draw on recent mechanistic ecological studies to argue that, in addition to altered habitat structure, three major processes contribute to the patterns of reduced species diversity and elevated abund...