Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 43

launching of the two Long-Term Ecological Research projects on urban ecology
(Urban LTERs) by the US National Science Foundation in 1997 played an
instrumental role in promoting the integration between human ecosystem-based
functional approaches and pattern-oriented landscape approaches (Pickett et al.
1997 ; Grimm et al. 2000 ; Jenerette and Wu 2001 ; Luck et al. 2001 ; Luck and Wu
2002 ; Wu and David 2002 ; Wu et al. 2003 ; Jenerette et al. 2006 ; Buyantuyev and
Wu 2009 , 2012 ). An urban landscape ecology that couples spatiotemporal patterns
with ecological processes began to take form in the early 2000s.
Since the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, eco-
system services (and their relationship with human well-being) have increasingly
become mainstream in ecology. This trend has been accompanied by the rapid
development of sustainability science that focuses on the dynamic relationship
between society and nature (Kates et al. 2001 ;Wu 2006 ). Consequently, a nascent
but robust research direction in urban landscape ecology now is focused on urban
sustainability (Fig. 3.4 ). This emerging urban sustainability approach integrates
the various urban ecology perspectives, and its scientific core develops around the
structure, function, and services of the urban landscape, frequently invoking
hierarchy theory, complex adaptive systems theory, and resilience theory (Wu and
David 2002 ; Alberti 2008 ;Wu 2010b ; Ahern 2013 ; Wu and Wu 2013 ).

3.4 A Framework for Urban Landscape Ecology

So, how should urban landscape ecology be defined? Simply put, urban landscape
ecology is landscape ecology of urban areas. More specifically, it is the science of
studying and improving the relationship between urban landscape pattern and
ecological processes for achieving urban sustainability. While urban sustainability
may be defined in a number of ways, here we define it as an adaptive process of
maintaining and improving ecosystem services and human well-being in the urban
landscape (Wu 2010a , 2013b ). As such, urban landscape ecology consists of three
interactive major components: quantifying the spatiotemporal patterns and
understanding the drivers and mechanisms of urbanization (''patterns/drivers
studies''), assessing the ecological and environmental impacts of urbanization
(''impacts studies''), and understanding and improving urban sustainability

(Figs. 3.5 and 3.6 ).
The first component is to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns and driving
processes of the urban landscape. This involves mapping and quantifying urban
morphological attributes and landscape patterns over time, identifying key
socioeconomic and environmental drivers, and understanding urban pattern-pro-
cess relationships on multiple scales ranging from the parcel to the metropolitan
region. Both landscape ecologist and geographers have done a great deal in this
front (Jenerette and Wu 2001 ; Luck and Wu 2002 ; Batty 2005 ; Schneider and
Woodcock 2008 ; Wu et al. 2011a , b ). Recent years have seen a rapid increase in
the number of this sort of studies. For these studies to be really relevant to societal