ABSTRACT
For urban planners, urban ecology has focused on designing the environmental amenities of cities for people and on reducing environmental impacts of urban regions. Bottom line—urban ecology research must include any and all anthropomorphic influences within a human-dominated ecological system. Ecological studies are a complex and complicated subject, but for the authors' purpose they distilled it down to four fundamental ecological principles: diversity, interrelationships, cycles, and energy. These principles represent the key ingredients for a sustainable ecosystem. The chapter points out several ways human manipulation of natural habitats destabilizes ecosystem structure and function. Urban development, for example, increases the amount and type of pollutants released into the environment, changing the biotic and abiotic structure of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and altering plant and animal relationships. Ecosystems are composed of biotic and abiotic components. The chapter provides several illustrations of how these components interact.
