Global ecosystem typology

Alternative site for the Global ecosystem typology with additional information for ecosystem profiles and indicative maps.

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T7.4 Urban and industrial ecosystems

Biome: T7. Intensive land-use biome

Contributors:
(texts)

Cities, smaller settlements and industrial areas are structurally complex ecosystems and characterised by their highly dynamic spatial structure. Diverse patch types include buildings, paved surfaces, transport infrastructure, parks and gardens; excavations, bare ground and refuse areas. Patches undergo periodic destruction and renewal. Human population density is high, relative to other ecosystems, and dependent on large subsidies of imported resources (particularly water, nutrients and food). Interactions among patch types and human social behaviours produce emergent properties and complex feedbacks among ecosystem components.

Key Features

Ecosystems dominated by anthroipogenic structures (e.g. buildings, roads, wastelands) associated with human infrastructures, intensive anthropogenic disturbance regimes, and severely altered biogeochemical site conditions.

Overview of distribution

Abundant worldwide in all regions settled by humans.

Profile versions

Main references

Selected references for this functional group:

  • Alberti M, Marzluff JM, Shulenberger E, Bradley G, Ryan C, Zumbrunnen C (2003) Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems Urban Ecology (Eds. Marzluff J.M. et al.) Springer, Boston, MA DOI:10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_9

  • Grimm NB, Faeth SH, Golubiewski NE, Redman CL, Wu J, Bai X, Briggs JM (2008) Global change and the ecology of cities Science 319: 756-760

Diagrammatic assembly model

Diagrammatic assembly model of T7.4 Urban and industrial ecosystems. See general notes on diagrams. Open image full size.

Maps

Maps are indicative of global distribution patterns are not intended to represent fine-scale patterns. The maps show areas of the world containing major (coloured red) or minor occurrences (coloured yellow) of each ecosystem functional group. See general notes on maps.

Information about the current valid indicative map for this functional group is shown below.

T7.4.WM.nwx_v1.0

The distribution of urban and industrial infrastructure lands was taken from a global land use/land cover map (LULC class 7 ‘built areas’) for the year 2020 at 10 metre resolution (Karra et al. 2021). Class 7 includes major road and rail networks, large homogenous impervious surfaces including parking structures, office buildings and residential housing, dense. Sparse villages may not be represented. We calculated the proportion of built area per square kilometre and applied a threshold of 1 to 5 % for minor occurrences and >5% for major occurrences. Open image full size.

Datasets

  • ESRI-2020-Landcover

Map references

  • Karra, Kontgis, et al. (2021) Global land use/land cover with Sentinel-2 and deep learning IGARSS 2021-2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IEEE

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