Global Change and the Ecology of Cities

2008/02/07 by Nancy B. Grimm, Stanley H. Faeth, Nancy E. Golubiewski +4 · 23 citations
Environmental Science · #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation #Urban Green Space and Health

paper · doi:10.1126/science.1150195

openalex publication_date 2008/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

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.

Citations

• Avoiding Green Marketing Myopia: Ways to Improve Consumer Appeal for Environmentally Preferable Products
• Urbanization as a major cause of biotic homogenization
• SETTING EXPECTATIONS FOR THE ECOLOGICAL CONDITION OF STREAMS: THE CONCEPT OF REFERENCE CONDITION
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Urban Ecological Systems: Linking Terrestrial Ecological, Physical, and Socioeconomic Components of Metropolitan Areas

Cited by

• A Review of Urban Water Body Challenges and Approaches: (1) Rehabilitation and Remediation
• Scaling up from gardens: biodiversity conservation in urban environments
• Urbanization promotes non-native woody species and diverse plant assemblages in the New York metropolitan region
• Landscape Urbanization and Economic Growth in China: Positive Feedbacks and Sustainability Dilemmas
• Sensitivity of habitat suitability-derived connectivity models to three-dimensional measures of urban landscape structure
• Megacities as Sources for Pathogenic Bacteria in Rivers and Their Fate Downstream
• Soil is brown gold in the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy
• Dynamic conservation for migratory species
• Urban and rural habitats differ in number and type of bird feeders and in bird species consuming supplementary food
• Population predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century
• Biconidium sinense gen. et sp. nov. (Hypocreales, Bionectriaceae) and Didymocyrtis shanxiensis sp. nov. (Phaeosphaeriaceae, Didymocyrtis) isolated from urban soil in China
• City sicker? A meta‐analysis of wildlife health and urbanization
• Spatiotemporal analysis of urban environment based on the vegetation–impervious surface–soil model
• Fostering Green Communities Through Civic Engagement: Community-Based Environmental Stewardship in the Portland Area
• Linking Urbanization and the Environment: Conceptual and Empirical Advances
• Atmospheric deposition of carbon and nutrients across an arid metropolitan area
• Nutrient Variation in an Urban Lake Chain and its Consequences for Phytoplankton Production
• Biodiversity in cities needs space: a meta‐analysis of factors determining intra‐urban biodiversity variation
• The contribution of constructed green infrastructure to urban biodiversity: A synthesis and meta‐analysis
• Mathematical modeling of urban sprawl
• Planetary Opportunities: A Social Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a Sustainable Future
• Jianguo Wu [wikipedia]
• Urban ecology [wikipedia]