Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of interest in the field of urban ecology. Not only has the academic ecological community decided that it is both an inherently interesting and practically significant topic of study, but there has also been a growing realisation in other quarters that an improved understanding of the ecology of urban areas may be vital for major issues such as human health and wellbeing.

This volume is intended to provide a broad overview of the field of urban ecology, particularly for those wanting to find out what it is essentially about, either as part of their general ecological education or perhaps with a view to begin working in this area. Some of the chapter topics could be equally relevant to almost any ecosystem (although the chapter contents would vary), others particularly reflect the intimate links between people and ecological pattern and process in urban areas. The book opens with chapters addressing what urban ecology is (Chapter 1) and some of the essentials of the urbanisation process (Chapter 2) and of ecosystem function in urban areas (Chapter 3). It moves on to consider how individual species (Chapter 4), species richness (Chapter 5) and alien species (Chapter 6) respond to urbanisation. The next three chapters tackle various facets of human–ecology interactions in urban environments, respectively those between people and wildlife (Chapter 7), between human social organisation and ecology (Chapter 8), and between human health and wellbeing and ecology (Chapter 9).