The Current Status of Urban Landscape Ecology Study and Its Perspectives

Urban landscape is the most important type of human-cultural landscape. Along with the global urbanization process, the number and area of the urban landscape keep increasing. The originality and development of the urban landscape has been always in association with intensive human activities for landscape alternation. Therefore, most landscape ecological issues emerging from human activities can be reflected during the process of the urban landscape development. Reasonable and effective resolution of these issues will be determined if the healthy development of the urban landscape as well as the socio-economic sustainable development can be achieved. The urban landscape ecology is the most active branch of landscape studies. On the basis of the recently published documents, this paper summarizes the development status quo of urban landscape ecology in 5 aspects. (1) Study on urban landscape pattern: it focuses on the whole urban landscape pattern, the gradient change characteristics, and the comparison study of urban and suburban landscape pattern characteristics. (2) Study on land use/land cover change: on the basis of discussion about relevant methodologies, this aspect pays attention to the conversion characteristics among various land use types in internal and suburban areas of a city, and makes prediction analysis on their dynamic changes. (3) Study on ecological recovery and ecological reasonability construction: it gives relevant theory and methodology solutions for problems in urban green space, city support function, and aesthetic construction. (4) Study on landscape dynamic changes: it sets up models for urban landscape dynamics, and analyzes the process rules and driving mechanisms of urban landscape change from spatial and non-spatial aspects. (5) Study on biodiversity of urban landscape: it studies the protection problems of different biological species in urban landscape, and meanwhile, discusses the ecological significance of some important species and their ecological maintenance solutions. Through analyzing the development status quo of urban landscape ecology study, we find that there exist considerable gaps in the areas as follows, driving mechanism of dynamic change of urban landscape, evaluation on ecological reasonability of structure and functions, optimized design models of landscape patterns, and decision support and management in urban development. These gaps, which limit the further theoretical development of urban landscape ecology and the application, should be the priorities areas for the future study. In addition, urban landscape ecology is a multi-disciplinary and comprehensive study category, so the research staff should work in close collaboration with scientists in other related fields, further progress in narrowing the above-mentioned gaps can be achieved.