Urban Landscape Ecology: Past, Present, and Future - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 48

A research area that can be called urban landscape ecology is identifiable, which is
part of landscape ecology and also related to urban ecology (as well as urban
geography and urban sociology). The existing studies on this topic, however, do
not yet form a cohesive framework or have a unified goal. In this chapter, we have
reviewed the intellectual roots of urban landscape ecology, and proposed a
framework to help move the field forward.
Landscapes and regions represent arguably the most operational scales for
sustainability research and practice (Forman 1990 , 2008 ;Wu 2006 ). To meet the
challenge of urban sustainability, cities need to be studied as spatially extended,
complex adaptive systems with interdisciplinary approaches integrating ecologi-
cal, economic, social, and design/planning sciences (Wu 2013b ). This seems to be
the main theme of urban landscape ecology or the future direction it is moving
towards. Landscape ecology needs to be more ''urban;'' urban ecology needs to be
more landscape-realistic; both need to focus more on sustainability.

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