Grimm Nancy B, Faeth Stanley H, Golubiewski Nancy E, Redman Charles L, Wu Jianguo, Bai Xuemei, Briggs John M
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501, USA.
Science. 2008 Feb 8;319(5864):756-60. doi: 10.1126/science.1150195.
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.
城市地区是推动多尺度环境变化的热点区域。生产和人类消费的物质需求在局部到区域范围内改变了土地利用和覆盖、生物多样性以及水文系统，而城市废弃物排放则影响着从局部到全球的生物地球化学循环和气候。然而，对于城市居民来说，全球环境变化被当地环境的巨大变化所掩盖。城市生态学将自然科学和社会科学结合起来，研究这些发生了根本改变的当地环境及其区域和全球影响。城市本身既带来了问题，也为日益城市化的世界的可持续发展挑战提供了解决方案。
