Cities are home to more than half of the world population. Cities have been the centers of economic and social developments, as well as sources of many major environmental problems. Cities are created and maintained by the most intense form of human-nature interactions. Cities are spatially extended, complex adaptive systems—which we call landscapes. The future of humanity will increasingly rel...

Reconciling human and non-human use of urban regions to support biological conservation represents a major challenge for the 21st century. The concept of reconciliation ecology, by which the anthropogenic environment may be modified to encourage non-human use and biodiversity preservation without compromising societal utilization, potentially represents an appropriate paradigm for urban conserv...

Ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. Landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. One element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...

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...

Urban sustainability is one of the most pressing and challenging tasks facing humanity today because cities are the primary sources of major environmental problems, the centers of economic and social developments, and home to more than half of the world population. While the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability are equally important in principle, the ecology of cities i...

URBAN computing is a process of acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human, to tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g., air pollution, increased energy consumption and traffic congestion. Urban computing connects unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing techno...

The eruption of the volcano in Iceland has proven once again that while we have increasing control over the environment, we are becoming more dependent and painfully aware that we are at its mercy. In fact, we have been making major efforts to address this issue for almost four decades, ever since sustainability was introduced as an environmental concept. Researchers have been constructing the ...

Patterns of urban development across the United States are changing natural landscapes and their dynamics. Although scholars in landscape ecology are increasingly studying the relationship between urban development and ecological conditions, few have directly addressed the question of how patterns of urban development affect landscape dynamics. In this paper we first propose that landscape patt...

“In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners, both public and private, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children wi...

Studies of urban wildlife are important because they can give us insight into both how animals adapt to novel environments and how some species survive and prosper in human-dominated landscapes. Urban zoological institutions provide an ideal setting for research on such species. We report on a study of the behavior and ecology of opossums (Didelphis virginiana) on the grounds of the St. Louis Z...