PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #73: Applied Ecology and Ecological Economics. Presiding: J. Hof.
Friday, August 10, 2001. 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Hall of Ideas P&Q.
Defining and measuring the urban-rural gradient.
Theobald, David1,2, 1 2
ABSTRACT- Ecologists are challenged to integrate socio-economic and ecological data to better understand human-dominated ecosystems. Progress in such integration is impeded by a lack of standard definitions of land use and socioeconomic factors, as well as a lack of gradient that can be adequately quantified. There are a number of conceptual frameworks to draw from, such as the urban-rural transect (McDonnell and Pickett), but the need to operationalize a gradient remains. For example, although urban is defined by the US Census Bureau as a population density of 1,000 people per square mile or more, suburban, exurban, and rural are defined simply as not urban. However, these terms are commonly used in ecological research and are increasingly used as a framework to examine the response of ecological variables to human-dominated ecosystems. Not only are these factors defined in a non-standardized fashion, but they are also infrequently defined quantitatively. This handicaps not only attempts to integrate socio-economic and ecological data, but it obviates comparative analyses of research conducted in different locations and at different times. In this paper I describe a number of quantitative attributes of human-dominated ecosystems, such as population density, housing density, land use type, and road density, that can be used to better operationalize the urban-rural gradient.
KEY WORDS: Human-dominated, land use, urban-rural, GIS