Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 37

population increases will take place in urban areas (mostly in developing countries
of Asia and Africa). It is certain, therefore, that our future will be increasingly urban.
Urbanization has been both a boon and a bane (Wu 2008a , 2010b ). Cities have
been the engines of economic growth and centers of innovation and sociocultural
development. Cities usually have higher use efficiencies of energy and materials,
as well as better access to education, jobs, health care, and social services than
rural areas. In addition, by concentrating human populations, urbanization should
be able to, at least in principle, save land for other species or nature conservation.
However, cities are also places of severe environmental problems, growing
socioeconomic inequality, and political and social instabilities. Although the
physically urbanized land covers merely about 3 % of the earth's land surface, the
''ecological footprints'' of cities are disproportionally large—often hundreds of
times their physical sizes (Luck et al. 2001 ; Jenerette and Potere 2010 ). Urban
areas account for about 78 % of carbon emissions, 60 % of residential water use,
and 76 % of the wood used for industrial purposes (Grimm et al. 2008 ;Wu 2008a ,
2010b ). As a result, urbanization has profoundly affected biodiversity, ecosystem
processes, ecosystem services, climate, and environmental quality on scales

ranging from the local city to the entire globe.
Until quite recently, however, ecologists have focused primarily on ''natural''
ecosystems, and treated cities largely as ''trashed ecosystems'' unworthy of study
(Collins et al. 2000 ). This does not mean that urban ecology is really ''new.'' In
fact, the field known as ''urban ecology'' had already existed before the terms
''ecosystem'' and ''landscape ecology'' were coined. Nevertheless, it is during the
past two decades that urban ecology has developed into a highly interdisciplinary
field of study, increasingly embraced by ecologists, geographers, and social sci-
entists. These recent and unprecedented developments in urban ecology have had
much to do with the rise of landscape ecology in general and urban landscape
studies in particular, resulting in a dynamic and exciting research field—urban
landscape ecology. Today, studies that focus on the spatiotemporal patterns, bio-
physical and socioeconomic drivers, and ecological and environmental impacts of
urbanization are mushrooming around the world (e.g., Fig. 3.1 ).
The main goal of this chapter is to provide a perspective on the scope, objec-
tives, and recent developments of urban landscape ecology. This is not intended to
be a comprehensive review of the literature on urban ecology. Rather, it is a
perspective on the past, present, and future of urban landscape ecology based on
our research experiences with cities in China and USA (Fig. 3.1 ).

3.2 Landscape Ecology and the Rising Urban Theme

Apparently, urban landscape ecology is part of landscape ecology, and thus it
makes sense to discuss the former within the context of the latter. Landscape
ecology is the science of studying and improving the relationship between spatial
pattern and ecological (and socioeconomic) processes on multiple scales (Wu and