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Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future

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Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture

Abstract

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 rely on cities, and the future of landscape ecology will inevitably be more urban. To meet the grand challenge of our time—sustainability—cities must be made sustainable and, to this end, landscape ecology has much to offer. In this chapter, we discuss the intellectual roots and recent development of urban landscape ecology and propose a framework for helping move it forward. This framework integrates perspectives and approaches from landscape ecology, urban ecology, sustainability science, and resilience theory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences and Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, PO Box 874501, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA

    Jianguo Wu

  2. Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability (CHESS), State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (ESPRE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jianguo Wu, Chunyang He, Ganlin Huang & Deyong Yu

Authors
  1. Jianguo Wu
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  2. Chunyang He
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  3. Ganlin Huang
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  4. Deyong Yu
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Correspondence to Jianguo Wu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Res. Center for Eco-Environmental Sci., Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, People's Republic

    Bojie Fu

  2. University of Nevada, Desert Research Institute University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

    K. Bruce Jones

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Wu, J., He, C., Huang, G., Yu, D. (2013). Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future. In: Fu, B., Jones, K. (eds) Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6530-6_3

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