Preface

Summary

Calls to study the ecology of urban areas were first made in the early twentieth century by both social scientists and traditional ecologists (i.e. plant and animal ecologists) (Adams, 1935, 1938). Some 40 years later, the Ecological Society of Australia held a symposium and published a follow-up book entitled The City as a Life System (Nix, 1972) which aimed to stimulate public and professional interest in the ecology of cities. At about the same time, a workshop was convened in the USA by The Institute of Ecology (TIE), now defunct, which brought together ecologists from a diversity of disciplines to identify national and regional urban needs. The proceedings of this workshop were published in a book entitled The Urban Ecosystem: A Holistic Approach (Stearns and Montag, 1974). Unfortunately, these books were not widely distributed and thus these early workshop efforts did not stimulate new North American or Australian ecological studies of human settlements. In contrast, European and some Australasian researchers have embraced the ecological study of urban ecosystems for over 30 years (e.g. Numata, 1976, 1977; Newcombe et al., 1978; Boyden et al., 1981; Bornkamm et al., 1982; Natuhara and Imai, 1996, 1999; Breuste et al., 1998; Sukopp, 1998, 2002).