Understanding Urban Ecology

Preface
Section I: Systems Approaches to Understanding How our Cities Work and Assessing Potentially More Sustainable Ways of Managing the Environment on Which We Depend
1. What Is Urban Ecology and Why Should We Study It?2. Urban Ecology from a Biophysical and Systems Perspective3. Social Processes, Urban Ecosystems and Sustainability

Section II: The City in History
4. Scale and Metabolism in Ancient Cities5. Economy and Development in Modern Cities
Section III: Urban Ecological Systems - Structure, Function, Controls, and Impacts on Social-Ecological Metabolism
6. The Urban Hydrological System7.The Climate System8. The Atmospheric System: Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases9. Nutrient Biogeochemistry of Urban Systems10. Material Cycles11. The Biological System: Plants in the Urban Environment12. The Biological System: Urban Wildlife, Adaptation and Evolution; Urbanization as a Driver of Contemporary Evolution in Gray Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis)13. Environmental Justice in the Urban Environment
Section IV: Designing Solutions to Deal with Impacts of Urbanization - Past, Present, and Future
14. Urban Food Systems15. Urban Design Toward More Holistic Systems: Improving Discipline Integration and Sustainability Evaluation16. The Epilogue

About the Author: Myrna H. P. Hall (Ed.) is Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science in Syracuse, NY, where she helped establish the College's Urban Initiative in 2001, was Director of the SUNY ESF Center for the Urban Environment, coordinated the College's Urban Environmental Science Minor, and worked with an interdisciplinary team of faculty members to design an urban ecology course which she taught for 12 years before retiring. As a spatial ecologist, her research and publications have focused on environmental alteration from human activities, including urban/suburban sprawl effects on water quality in the New York City Catskill-Delaware watersheds, ecosystem impacts of glacier loss in Glacier National Park, and the impact of alternative urban green infrastructure implementation on urban energy budgets. She has done extensive land use change modeling in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and Belize to estimate carbon benefits of avoided deforestation. Her interests span urban ecology and architecture, geographic information systems, and land change modeling.
Stephen Balogh earned his doctorate from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the US EPA Office of Research and Development in the Atlantic Ecology Division. He is an environmental scientist who studies communities and their connections to the environment across global, regional and local scales - including nutrient issues, ecosystem services, energy and material flows, and restoration. He has collaborated with other scientists, academics, and stakeholders on a broad range of interdisciplinary research. These projects range in scale from regional optimization of nitrogen removal interventions in Cape Cod to neighborhood scale analyses of ecosystem services and material and energy flows resulting from restoration efforts and population dynamics in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Prior to his current position, he worked as a visiting assistant professor at SUNY-ESF and adjunct at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, where he taught courses about urban ecology, renewable energy, and sustainable business strategies. His PhD dissertation is entitled "Feeding and Fueling the Cities of the 21st Century." He has published eleven papers and several book chapters on the nexus of the environment, energy, and the economy.