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Urban landscape sustainability and resilience: the promise and challenges of integrating ecology with urban planning and design

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Abstract

The twenty-first century global population will be increasingly urban-focusing the sustainability challenge on cities and raising new challenges to address urban resilience capacity. Landscape ecologists are poised to contribute to this challenge in a transdisciplinary mode in which science and research are integrated with planning policies and design applications. Five strategies to build resilience capacity and transdisciplinary collaboration are proposed: biodiversity; urban ecological networks and connectivity; multifunctionality; redundancy and modularization, adaptive design. Key research questions for landscape ecologists, planners and designers are posed to advance the development of knowledge in an adaptive mode.

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  1. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Jack Ahern

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  1. Jack Ahern
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Correspondence to Jack Ahern.

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Ahern, J. Urban landscape sustainability and resilience: the promise and challenges of integrating ecology with urban planning and design. Landscape Ecol 28, 1203–1212 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9799-z

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