A Workshop to Develop a Strategy for Advancing Urban Ecology, held in Laurel, MD in the spring of 2006

我们将举办研讨会，加快城市生态学学科的成熟。研讨会将评估目前关于城市生态的知识状况，并为研究人员、资源管理者和政策制定者综合这些信息。研讨会还将确定新的或迫切需要的研究方向。参加讨论的工作组的任务是确定和综合一系列假说、需求和方法，以指导未来城市和城市化景观的生态研究。在考虑的方法中，将包括启动国内和跨国城市的比较研究，以及开发便于比较的标准化方法的价值。由于城市生态系统不同于其他生态系统的人类居住，人类的占有和管理直接或间接地驱动着城市的生态结构和过程。因此，讲习班的首要目标之一将是确定如何着手，以确定不同的地理、环境和社会经济背景对物种种群、生物群落和生态系统进程的影响。还将探讨这些生态系统中影响人们生活质量的自然、建造和人类组成部分之间的反馈。研讨会小组将明确考虑加深我们对人类在多个社会尺度上的决策过程及其对生态异质性时空动态的影响的科学理解的方法。发展这样的综合研究并为未来的研究提供路线图将有助于使城市生态学成为一门更具预测性的科学，并为未来城市和城市化景观中更多以科学为基础的决策和土地利用规划提供基础。

We will conduct a workshop to accelerate the maturation of the discipline of Urban Ecology. The workshop will assess the current state of knowledge concerning the ecology of cities, and synthesize this information for researchers, resource managers, and policy makers. The workshop will also identify new or critically needed research directions. Working groups in discussion sessions will be tasked with identifying and synthesizing sets of hypotheses, needs and approaches to guide future ecological research in urban and urbanizing landscapes. The value of initiating comparative studies of cities within and across nations, and developing standardized methods to facilitate comparisons, will be among those approaches considered. Since urban ecosystems differ from other ecosystems in being inhabited by people, human occupation and management directly and indirectly drive ecological structure and processes in cities. Therefore, one of the overarching goals of the workshop will be to identify how to proceed so as to determine the effects of differing geographic, environmental and socio-economic contexts on species populations, biological communities and ecosystem processes. Feedbacks between natural, built and human components of these ecosystems that influence quality of life for people will also be explored. Workshop groups will explicitly consider means of deepening our scientific understanding of human decision-making processes across multiple social scales and their influences on the spatio-temporal dynamics of ecological heterogeneity. Developing such a synthesis and providing a road map for future research will contribute to making urban ecology a more predictive science, and provide a foundation for more science-based policymaking and land-use planning in urban and urbanizing landscapes in the future.