Steward T. A. Pickett, Weiqi Zhou, Daniel L. Childers, J. Morgan Grove, Winslow D. Hansen, Dexter H. Locke, Christopher Boone, Karen C. Seto, Dawa Zhaxi, Shannon LaDeau, Leonard Nevarez, R. Freudenberg, Christopher T. Solomon, Elizabeth M. Cook, Russell Urban-Mead, D Maddox, Adam Bosch
This perspective presents a new framework to improve ecological contributions to understanding how urban, rural, and wild attributes can co-occur and mix within specific locations, producing configurations that cannot be understood through binary contrasts. We focus on mixed conditions and the processes that sustain dynamic mosaics of mixed urban-rural sites. This framework complements others that avoid the urban-rural binary, and supports integrated social and ecological research across landscapes of mixture.