Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 42

Fig. 3.4 Different perspectives in urban ecology and the rising prominence of the urban
landscape ecology approach to the studies of cities and human-dominant areas (modified from
Wu 2008a , b , 2013a , b )
is a key component in urban landscape ecology, particularly when urban sus-
tainability is considered as its ultimate goal (Fig. 3.4 ).
In the late 1940s, European ecologists, most noticeably the ''Berlin school,''
began to study remnant plant and animal species in cities—a bio-ecological
approach or the ''ecology in cities'' approach (Grimm et al. 2000 ; Pickett et al.
2001 ;Wu 2008a ). Excellent reviews of these studies are found in Sukopp ( 1990 ,
2002 ). In the 1970s forest ecologists (e.g., Forest Stearns) and ecosystem ecolo-
gists (e.g., the Odum brothers) advocated ecosystem-based approaches to studying
the structure and function of cities (Stearns and Montag 1974 ; Odum 1983 ). H. T.
Odum's emergy-based urban approach is still being used by some (Huang and
Chen 2009 ; Lee et al. 2013 ). Not until the early 1990s did urban ecology start to
move into the mainstream of ecology. A seminal paper during this time period was
McDonnell and Pickett ( 1990 ) that introduced the well-established gradient
analysis method in plant community ecology and vegetation science to the study of
urban ecosystems—the urban-rural gradient approach.
During the 1980s, landscape ecology was developing swiftly in North America
and beyond, and many of the landscape studies dealt with land use and land cover
change including urbanization. With the rapidly increasing availability of remote
sensing data, GIS, and spatial pattern analysis methods (e.g., landscape metrics),
the number of studies on the spatiotemporal patterns and socioeconomic drivers of
urbanization began to soar (many such ''patterns and drivers studies'' continue to
be done by physical geographers, remote sensing scientists, and the like). The