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Global urbanization: can ecologists identify a sustainable way forward?
Abstract
The year 2007 was the first year in which more than half of humanity lived in cities. Over the next 25 years, the world will see the addition of nearly one million km2 of urban area, occurring in tens of thousands of cities around the globe. The form these new neighborhoods take will affect our planet's ecology profoundly. Here, I highlight the connection between urban form and ecosystem service generation and consumption. I also discuss how urban form controls energy use, and hence oil security and climate change. I argue that only by directly addressing the implications of urban growth as a research subject will ecologists meet their responsibility to provide a foundation for a sustainable biosphere, a mandate of the Ecological Society of America.
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Citations
Cited by
Water on an urban planet: Urbanization and the reach of urban water infrastructure
McDonald, R. I., Weber, K., Padowski, J., Flörke, M., Schneider, C., Green, P. A., Gleeson, T., Eckman, S., Lehner, B., Balk, D., et al. (2014) · Global Environmental Change · doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.022 · Cited by 786
Self-citationResearch gaps in knowledge of the impact of urban growth on biodiversity
McDonald, R. I., Mansur, A. V., Ascensão, F., Colbert, M., Crossman, K., Elmqvist, T., Gonzalez, A., Güneralp, B., Haase, D., Hamann, M., et al. (2019) · Nature Sustainability · doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0436-6 · Cited by 600
Self-citationCobbinah, P. B., Erdiaw-Kwasie, M. O., & Amoateng, P. (2015) · Environmental Development · doi:10.1016/j.envdev.2014.11.001 · Cited by 297
Urban effects, distance, and protected areas in an urbanizing world
Mcdonald, R. I., Forman, R. T. T., Kareiva, P., Neugarten, R., Salzer, D., & Fisher, J. (2009) · Landscape and Urban Planning · doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2009.06.002 · Cited by 280
Self-citationMaintaining ecological integrity and sustaining ecosystem function in urban areas
Alberti, M. (2010) · Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability · doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2010.07.002 · Cited by 261
Metadata
- Authors
- McDonald, R. I.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2008-03
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 99-104
- ISSN
- 1540-9295 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2030087676
- Cited by
- 185
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- McDonald, R. I. (2008). Global urbanization: can ecologists identify a sustainable way forward? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.1890/070038
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
