Urban Ecology

During the 1920s, sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest Watson Burgress developed a theory that proposed that cities are similar to environments found in nature, regulated by fundamental assumptions similar to those that govern the natural world. Specifically, this theory holds the notion that the overall structure of cities is based on the struggle for limited land use. Over time, urban ecology has evolved to include a wider spectrum where it now generally refers to a subsection of ecology that studies the interactions among human beings, plants, and animals within an urban and metropolitan area, as well as the effects that urbanization have on natural ecosystems and biodiversity within the areas. Urban ecosystems are often described as

Since the economic reform in 1978, China has been urbanizing at a record speed in part due to the exponential growth of national gross domestic product (GDP), rural to urban migrations, and land reclassifications. This is very different from urbanization in the west as the transformation of Chinese urbanization as it is both a consequence of the social and economic changes of the employment and investment patterns needed to properly house a transport and house a workforce (citation needed).However, numerous other factors continue to shape China’s

Most researchers in China who do work regarding some ecological problems often lack training in the basics of ecology, where the focus tends to be based on urban pollution problems that often minimizes the role of biological organisms (citation needed). This problem is only aggravated by the lack of importance of urban ecology within the Chinese scientific community. The value of basic research and theoretical development as a testable model are often devalued, where the research may deal with a few aspects of the urban ecology without considering the urban ecosystem as a