The world’s population is concentrated in urban areas. This change in demography has brought landscape transformations that have a number of documented effects on stream ecosystems. The most consistent and pervasive effect is an increase in impervious surface cover within urban catchments, which alters the hydrology and geomorphology of streams. This results in predictable changes in stream habitat. In addition to imperviousness, runoff from urbanized surfaces as well as municipal and industrial discharges result in increased loading of nutrients, metals, pesticides, and other contaminants to streams. These changes result in consistent declines in the richness of algal, invertebrate, and fish communities in urban streams. Although understudied in urban streams, ecosystem processes are also affected by urbanization. Urban streams represent opportunities for ecologists interested in studying disturbance and contributing to more effective landscape management.

/pdf/streams-in-the-urban-landscape-mt89v53ix5.pdf

Streams in the Urban Landscape

Comparison of impervious surface area and normalized difference vegetation index as indicators of surface urban heat island effects in Landsat imagery

The world's human population is becoming concentrated into cities, giving rise to concerns that it is becoming increasingly isolated from nature. Urban public greenspaces form the arena of many people's daily contact with nature and such contact has measurable physical and psychological benefits. Here we show that these psychological benefits increase with the species richness of urban greenspaces. Moreover, we demonstrate that greenspace users can more or less accurately perceive species richness depending on the taxonomic group in question. These results indicate that successful management of urban greenspaces should emphasize biological complexity to enhance human well-being in addition to biodiversity conservation.

/pdf/psychological-benefits-of-greenspace-increase-with-49nliaqh9q.pdf

Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity

http://geodesy.unr.edu/hanspeterplag/library/IGARSS2010/pdfs/1309.pdf

Remote sensing of the urban heat island effect across biomes in the continental USA

Our central paradigm for urban ecology is that cities are emergent phenomena of local-scale, dynamic interactions among socioeconomic and biophysical forces. These complex interactions give rise to a distinctive ecology and to distinctive ecological forcing functions. Separately, both the natural and the social sciences have adopted complex system theory to study emergent phenomena, but attempts to integrate the natural and social sciences to understand human-dominated systems remain reductionist—these disciplines generally study humans and ecological processes as separate phenomena. Here we argue that if the natural and social sciences remain within their separate domains, they cannot explain how human-dominated ecosystems emerge from interactions between humans and ecological processes. We propose an integrated framework to test formal hypotheses about how human-dominated ecosystems evolve from those interactions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053%5B1169:IHIEOA%5D2.0.CO;2

Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems

Planners concerned with water resource protection in urbanizing areas must deal with the adverse impacts of polluted runoff. Impervious surface coverage is a quantifiable land-use indicator that correlates closely with these impacts. Once the role and distribution of impervious coverage are understood, a wide range of strategies to reduce impervious surfaces and their impacts on water resources can be applied to community planning, site-level planning and design, and land use regulation. These strategies complement many current trends in planning, zoning, and landscape design that go beyond water pollution concerns to address the quality of life in a community.

/pdf/impervious-surface-coverage-the-emergence-of-a-key-344g6x5phu.pdf

C. James Gibbons

Papers

Impervious surface coverage: the emergence of a key environmental indicator