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A presentation of key findings and insights from over two decades of research, education, and community engagement in the acclaimed Baltimore Ecosystem Study. In a world of over seven billion people-who mostly reside in cities and their suburbs and exurbs-the Baltimore Ecosystem Study is recognized as a pioneering program for modern urban social-ecological science, critical to the emerging theory of urban ecology. After two decades of research, education, and community engagement in this complex system, there are insights to share, generalizations to examine, and gaps to highlight. This timely volume synthesizes the key empirical findings, melds the perspectives of different disciplines, and celebrates the accomplishments of interacting with diverse communities and institutions in improving the understanding of Baltimore's ecology. These widely applicable insights from Baltimore contribute to our understanding the ecology of other cities, provide a comparison for the global process of urbanization, and inform establishment of urban ecological research elsewhere. Comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and highly original, it gives voice to the wide array of specialists who have contributed to this living urban laboratory.

Summarising the state of knowledge about biodiversity in drylands, this text seeks to identify questions and strategies for future research and to lay out guidelines for management of biodiversity in desert and semidesert regions. The continuing sensitivity of drylands to desertification, the fact that they occupy 40% of the world's terrestrial area, and the increasing human populations in these regions, make the understanding of their biodiversity and its changes over time of central importance. Drylands also provide a natural laboratory to address general questions about biodiversity, ecological succession, etc., because the relative spareness of the landscape allows one to isolate all the variables more effectively than can be done in biologically richer terrains.

A new tool for mapping urban land cover that integrates design principles and ecological knowledge for understanding cities as complex, patchy and dynamic systems Using a new, hybrid approach to urban land cover classification as an impetus to bring ecologists and urban designers together, this atlas is a unique conceptual tool to describe and analyze cities as complex systems. It brings together over a decade of shared knowledge from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study to inspire ecologically motivated design practice. The atlas displays maps and tables depicting land cover classes and the relationships between them; information on how the specific cover arrangements evolved over time; and speculations on how they might change through design, disturbance, or succession. Rather than separating human-constructed spaces from predominantly biological and geological ones, this book integrates social and ecological structures and shows how this can contribute to the scholarship of ecology and the practice of design. Interdisciplinary and strikingly illustrated, the atlas is a new way to study, measure, and view cities with a more effective interaction of scientific understanding and design practice.

A leading-edge guide to thinking about and planning for twenty-first-century cities in all their social, political, and ecological complexity The first "urban century" in history has arrived: a majority of the world's population now resides in cities and their surrounding suburbs. Urban expansion marches on, and the planning and design of future cities requires attention to such diverse issues as human migration, public health, economic restructuring, water supply, climate and sea-level change, and much more. This important book draws on two decades of pioneering social and ecological studies in Baltimore to propose a new way to think about cities and their social, political, and ecological complexity that will apply in many different parts of the world. Readers will gain fresh perspectives on how to study, build, and manage cities in innovative and sustainable ways