Urbanisation modifies landscapes at multiple scales, impacting the local climate and changing the extent and quality of natural habitats. These habitat modifications significantly alter species distributions and can result in increased abundance of select species which are able to exploit novel ecosystems. We examined the effect of urbanisation at local and landscape scales on the body size, li...

The term "rural" suggests many things to many people, such as agricultural landscapes, isolation, small towns, and low population density.However, defining "rural" for health policy and research purposes requires researchers and policy analysts to specify which aspects of rurality are most relevant to the topic at hand and then select an appropriate definition. Rural and urban taxonomies often ...

Many studies have assessed the effect of landscape patterns on spatial ecological processes by simulating these processes in computer-generated landscapes with varying composition and configuration. To generate such landscapes, various neutral landscape models have been developed. However, the limited set of landscape-level pattern variables included in these models is often inadequate to gener...

In 1990, the Chicago Academy of Sciences held a conference, Sustainable Cities: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity, which led to the publication of a book entitled The Ecological City (Platt et aI., 1994). This symposium differed from others on cities at that time by focusing principally on cities as habitats for biodiversity. The thrust of the symposium was that interactions between p...

Tropical landscapes are rapidly changing due to deforestation and agricultural expansion, entailing the loss fragmentation of natural habitats. Understanding how these changes affect genetic diversity gene flow in key native pollinators is great importance assure their survival provision pollination services. In this context, we studied landscape features influence one most widespread species s...

Some claim that car-dependent cities contribute to obesity by discouraging walking and bicycling. In this article, we use household activity data from the San Francisco region to study the links between urban environments and nonmotorized travel. We used factor analysis to represent the urban design and land-use diversity dimensions of built environments. Combining factor scores with control va...

Population responses of synanthropic species to urbanization may be explained by the resource-matching rule, which postulates that individuals should distribute themselves according to resource availability. According to the resource-matching rule, urban habitats will contain greater densities if they provide better resources than rural habitats. However, because resource availability is densit...

Insect pollinators provide a crucial ecosystem service, but are under threat. Urban areas could be important for pollinators, though their value relative to other habitats is poorly known. We compared pollinator communities using quantified flower-visitation networks in 36 sites (each 1 km(2)) in three landscapes: urban, farmland and nature reserves. Overall, flower-visitor abundance and specie...

Post World War II suburban growth in Canada and the US has created concern over the long-term availability of farmland to meet food production needs. Subsequent efforts to provide legal protection to agricultural land continue to shape the development of the fringes of nearby urban areas. This paper employs the concept of “agriburbia,” suburban landscapes in which agriculture maintains a signif...

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...