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Abstract There are urgent calls for developing a comprehensive and globally-relevant urban science that emphasizes convergence among disciplines and practice. Advancing theory and conceptual frameworks is critical to developing a new urban systems science. We synthesize five frameworks that address features identified in calls for global urban science. The frameworks address the overarching urban conditions of complexity, diffuseness, connectivity, and diversity of cities across the globe. The frameworks also help evaluate how a project or study may advance sustainability. The metacity concept, a spatially scalable representation of mosaic change in urban systems, demonstrates how the frameworks apply to increasingly extensive, spatially heterogeneous, and dynamic urban regions. The metacity concept helps avoid static and isolated plans and management approaches and provides a conceptual foundation for an interdisciplinary urban systems science. The frameworks suggest a practical checklist that may help interventions, strategies, and research better align with goals for transforming urban systems toward sustainability. 

Landscape structure in the Eastern US experienced great changes in the last century with the expansion of forest cover into abandoned agricultural land and the clearing of secondary forest cover for urban development. In this paper, the spatial and temporal patterns of forest cover from 1914 to 2004 in the Gwynns Falls watershed in Baltimore, Maryland were quantified from historic maps and aerial photographs. Using a database of forest patches from six times—1914, 1938, 1957, 1971, 1999, and 2004—we found that forest cover changed, both temporally and spatially. While total forest area remained essentially constant, turnover in forest cover was very substantial. Less than 20% of initial forest cover remained unchanged. Forest cover became increasingly fragmented as the number, size, shape, and spatial distribution of forest patches within the watershed changed greatly. Forest patch change was also analyzed within 3-km distance bands extending from the urban core to the more suburban end of the watershed. This analysis showed that, over time, the location of high rates of forest cover change shifted from urban to suburban bands which coincides with the spatial shift of urbanization. Forest cover tended to be more stable in and near the urban center, whereas forest cover changed more in areas where urbanization was still in process. These results may have critical implications for the ecological functioning of forest patches and underscore the need to integrate multi-temporal data layers to investigate the spatial pattern of forest cover and the temporal variations of that spatial pattern. Zhou, W., G. Huang, S. T. A. Pickett, and M. L. Cadenasso. 2011. 90 Years of Forest Cover Change in an Urbanizing Watershed: Spatial and Temporal Dynamics. Landscape Ecology 26:645–659. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-011-9589-z.