Integrated approaches to long-term studies of urban ecological systems

We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called "natural" entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided by m an. Such a course is not scientifically sound because scientific analysis m ust penetrate beneath the forms of the "natural" entities, and it is not pr actically useful because ecology must be applied to conditions brought abou t by human activity. The "natural" entities and the anthropogenic derivates alike must be analyzed in terms of the most appropriate concepts we can fi nd.