Urban Ecology - Ecological Systems - page 285

by comparing amongst urban areas across the globe. These working principles
identify assumptions and suggest hypotheses that can be used to guide future
research on urban socio-ecological systems.

Future Directions

Although, as shown above, urban ecology has deep roots as a biological science as
well as important parallels in social sciences and the design professions, it remains
a young discipline. It is poised for significant growth and increased practical
importance. There are three realms in which future directions cluster.

Interdisciplinary Integration for Understanding

Urban areas have been studied by many different disciplines, ranging from sociol-
ogy, physical and human geography, economics, anthropology, and the more recent
offshoots of these classic fields, such as political ecology, political economy, and
human ecology. There is a large opportunity for integration across these
perspectives. Accomplishing that integration is beyond the scope of this article,
but ecological science has an important role to play in promoting integration among
the diverse perspectives these disciplines represent. Ecology can play this role
because it is preeminently an integrative discipline. It incorporates several
contrasting perspectives that together define a goal for a more complete understand-
ing of systems that contain biophysical components and biologically driven pro-
cesses among their complex structures and functions. Ecology as a science focuses
on (1) the interactions of organisms and environment through feedbacks, (2) the
interactions of organisms with each other, (3) and the transformations that
organisms generate within the environment. It is thus a science of interaction,
feedback, and change. These three features are among the most important

characteristics of urban systems.
Ecology can be a further stimulus to integration within urban systems because of
its growing appreciation and study of the role of humans in ecosystems ranging
from remote wilderness to suburbs and downtown districts [ 12 ]. This biological
science has begun to link effectively with economics, with social sciences, with
hydrology, and with atmospheric sciences, for example, in order to contribute to
more comprehensive models of inhabited and built landscapes [ 44 ]. Yet there is still
more work to be done on these various frontiers of integration, and the range of
urban systems and ecosystem patches within complex city-suburban-exurban
systems is an important arena in which to test hypotheses and models combining
the perspectives of the different disciplines. Furthermore, data that integrate differ-
ent disciplinary perspectives and the attempt to generalize cautiously from these
data are important empirical activities.