Laband (economics, Georgia Institute of Technology), Lockaby, and Zipperer offer a volume for urban planners, natural resource managers, farmers, ranchers, and citizens that examines the spatial transition from the natural to the built environment. Economics, demographics, geography, forest service, ecology, public policy, and other specialists from the US discuss whether and how human demographics reflect the linkages along urban-rural interfaces, then changes in ecosystem/landscape structure and function along urban-rural gradients, including the ecological consequences of landscape change, the impacts of urbanization on hydrologic and biogeochemical processes that are critical to the quantity and quality of surface water flows and present water supply challenges in urban settings, how development at the urban-rural interface and projected increases in rural housing density affect forest systems, services, and health, the relationship between urbanization and nonnative invasive plant species, and the effects of urbanization on faunal biodiversity. Subsequent sections cover the changing human dimensions of urban-rural interfaces, such as in the pattern of private forest land ownership and the size distribution of land holdings, the distribution of ecosystem services for human health and welfare, the political and economic aspects of urban vs. rural, social vulnerability to environmental change, movements of people along the urban-rural interface and implications for natural resources management and community planning, and land conservation, as well as integrating human and natural systems, including discussion of research tools, planning, and wildfires. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
