Urban ecology

Urban ecology is the scientific study of the relation of living organisms with each other and their surroundings in the context of an urban environment. The urban environment refers to environments dominated by high-density residential and commercial buildings, paved surfaces, and other urban-related factors that create a unique landscape dissimilar to most previously studied environments in the field of ecology.

Urban ecology is a recent field of study compared to ecology as a whole. The methods and studies of urban ecology are similar to and comprise a subset of ecology. The study of urban ecology carries increasing importance because more than 50% of the world's population today lives in urban areas. At the same time, it is estimated that within the next forty years, two-thirds of the world's population will be living in expanding urban centers. The ecological processes in the urban environment are comparable to those outside the urban context. However, the types of urban habitats and the species that inhabit them are poorly documented. Often, explanations for phenomena examined in the urban setting as well as predicting changes because of urbanization are the center for scientific research.

Ecology has historically focused on "pristine" natural environments, but by the 1970s many ecologists began to turn their interest towards ecological interactions taking place in, and caused by urban environments. Jean-Marie Pelt's 1977 book The Re-Naturalized Human, Brian Davis' 1978 publication Urbanization and the diversity of insects, and Sukopp et al.'s 1979 article "The soil, flora and vegetation of Berlin's wastelands" are some of the first publications to recognize the importance of urban ecology as a separate and distinct form of ecology the same way one might see landscape ecology as different from population ecology. Forman and Godron's 1986 book Landscape Ecology first distinguished urban settings and landscapes from other landscapes by dividing all landscapes into five broad types. These types were divided by the intensity of human influence ranging from pristine natural environments to urban centers.

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