Journal ArticleDOI
Global Change and the Ecology of Cities
Nancy B. Grimm,Stanley H. Faeth,Nancy Golubiewski,Charles L. Redman,Jianguo Wu,Xuemei Bai,John M. Briggs +6 more
TLDR
Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects of an increasingly urbanized world.Abstract:
Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools
TL;DR: S spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change are developed and the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass are explored to minimize global biodiversity and vegetation carbon losses.
Global Forecasts of Urban Expansion to 2030 and Direct Impacts on Biodiversity and Carbon Pools
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass, showing that urban land cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion
TL;DR: A meta-analysis of 326 studies that have used remotely sensed images to map urban land conversion suggests that contemporary urban expansion is related to a variety of factors difficult to observe comprehensively at the global level, including international capital flows, the informal economy, land use policy, and generalized transport costs.
Journal ArticleDOI
The footprint of urban heat island effect in China
TL;DR: Using MODIS data from 2003 to 2012, it is shown that the UHI effect decayed exponentially toward rural areas for majority of the 32 Chinese cities, and an obvious urban/rural temperature “cliff” is found.
Journal ArticleDOI
Defining urban resilience: A review
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience: definition of urban resilience, understanding of system equilibrium, positive vs. neutral (or negative) conceptualizations of resilience, mechanisms for system change, adaptation versus general adaptability, and timescale of action.
References
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Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Susan Solomon,Dahe Qin,Martin R. Manning,Melinda Marquis,Kristen Averyt,Melinda M.B. Tignor,H. L. Miller,Z. Chen +7 more
TL;DR: The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report as mentioned in this paper was published in 2007 and covers several topics including the extensive range of observations now available for the atmosphere and surface, changes in sea level, assesses the paleoclimatic perspective, climate change causes both natural and anthropogenic, and climate models for projections of global climate.
Book
Climate change 2007 : the physical science basis : contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a historical overview of climate change science, including changes in atmospheric constituents and radiative forcing, as well as changes in snow, ice, and frozen ground.
Journal ArticleDOI
Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
TL;DR: A review by Czech and colleagues (2000) finds that urbanization endangers more species and is more geographically ubiquitous in the mainland United States than any other human activity, emphasizing the uniquely far-reaching transformations that accompany urban sprawl as discussed by the authors.
Book ChapterDOI
Streams in the Urban Landscape
Michael J. Paul,Judy L. Meyer +1 more
TL;DR: The most consistent and pervasive effect is an increase in impervious surface cover within urban catchments, which alters the hydrology and geomorphology of streams as discussed by the authors, which results in predictable changes in stream habitat.
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