Exposing an urban ecology straw man: critique of Ramalho and Hobbs

In their recent article in TREE, Ramalho and Hobbs [1] call for a more mechanistic urban ecology that better incorporates the dynamic nature of urban areas in both time and space. We agree with their goals, but we feel that their assessment of urban ecological research was elementary and misrepresents the actual state of the science. Urban ecologists [2] are fully aware that modern cities do not develop as concentric rings, but instead grow in the spatially and temporally complex, non-linear ways that Ramalho and Hobbs emphasize [1].