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Urban Ecology pp 143–158Cite as

Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems

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Abstract

Our central paradigm for urban ecology is that cities are emergent phenomena of local-scale, dynamic interactions among socioeconomic and biophysical forces. These complex interactions give rise to a distinctive ecology and to distinctive ecological forcing functions. Separately, both the natural and the social sciences have adopted complex system theory to study emergent phenomena, but attempts to integrate the natural and social sciences to understand human-dominated systems remain reductionist—these disciplines generally study humans and ecological processes as separate phenomena. Here we argue that if the natural and social sciences remain within their separate domains, they cannot explain how human-dominated ecosystems emerge from interactions between humans and ecological processes. We propose an integrated framework to test formal hypotheses about how human-dominated ecosystems evolve from those interactions.

Keywords

  • ecology
  • human-dominated
  • ecosystems
  • urban patterns
  • emergence
  • niche

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-5740, USA

    Marina Alberti

Authors
  1. Marina Alberti
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  2. John M. Marzluff
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  3. Eric Shulenberger
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  4. Gordon Bradley
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  5. Clare Ryan
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  6. Craig Zumbrunnen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Box 352100, Seattle, WA 98195

    John M. Marzluff, Gordon Bradley & Clare Ryan,  & 

  2. University of Washington, 3912 NE 127th Street, Seattle, WA 98125

    Eric Shulenberger

  3. Geographisches Institute, Humboldt University Unter den Linden, 10099 Berlin, Germany

    Wilfried Endlicher

  4. University of Washington, Box 355740, Seattle, WA 98195

    Marina Alberti

  5. Humboldt University Miningstrasse 46, 12359 Berlin, Germany

    Ute Simon

  6. University of Washington, Box 355740, Seattle, WA 98195

    Craig ZumBrunnen

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Alberti, M., Marzluff, J.M., Shulenberger, E., Bradley, G., Ryan, C., Zumbrunnen, C. (2008). Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems. In: , et al. Urban Ecology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_9

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