“…The total global urban area quadrupled during the period from 1970 to 2000 (Seto, Fragkias, Güneralp, & Reilly, 2011). Though urbanization promotes socioeconomic development and improves quality of life, urban expansion inevitably converts the natural and semi-natural ecosystems into impervious surfaces and thus has tremendous ecological and environmental consequences, such as forest loss and fragmentation (Miller, 2012;Zhou, Huang, Pickett, & Cadenasso, 2011), local and regional climate change (Kalnay & Cai, 2003;Kaufmann et al, 2007), hydrological circle alteration (Jacobson, 2011;Yang, Bowling, Cherkauer, & Pijanowski, 2011), and biotic homogenization (McKinney, 2008(McKinney, , 2006. While urban land covers only less than 3% of the global terrestrial surface, the ecological and environmental impacts of urban expansion are global (Grimm et al, 2008).…”