Fragmentation of natural habitats by urban development at Sochi

Assessing and Mapping Urban Ecological Resilience Using the Loss-Gain Approach: A Case Study of Tehran, Iran

“…Urban expansion has a fragmenting, isolating, and destructive impact on natural habitats (Astiaso Garcia, Bruschi, Cinquepalmi, & Cumo, 2013;Marzluff, 2001;Potenza, Gerardi, Fascetti, & Rosati, 2022;Zambrano, Aronson, & Fernandez, 2019). It also simplifies and homogenizes species composition (Mironova, Volkova, Gura, & Makar, 2022), disrupts hydrological systems (Arnold & Gibbons, 1996;Tayebi et al, 2022), and alters energy flow and nutrient cycling (Booth & Jackson, 1997;Modrzyński & Karaszewski, 2022;Wang, Van Dam, Triantafyllidis, Koppelaar, & Shah, 2017). Despite urban areas covering only a small portion of the total land surface (Liu, He, Zhou, & Wu, 2014;UNO, 2018), they consume a significant share of land's carrying capacity in terms of resource and energy consumption, waste generation, and pollutant emissions (OECD G20, 2021;Zheng, Xiao, You, Feng, & Zhiming, 2022).…”