a second steady state of greatly reduced and highly fragmented natural land coyer The natural "steady" state depends on natural disturbance :egimes. The sprawl state,is a forced equilibrium that results when agents In the system do not have complete information about the full ecological costs of providing human services to low-density development (Alberti and Marzluff 2004).
Marzluff and I hypothesize that resilience in urban ecosystems is defined by the system's ability to maintain human and ecosystem functions simultaneQusly. In urbanizing regions, ecological and human functions are interdependent. As urbanization increases, the system moves away from the natural vegetation attractor toward the sprawl attractor and beyond, until increasingly urbanized ecological systems become unable to support the human popUlation. As we replace ecological functions with human functions in urbanizing regions, the processes sypporting the ecosystem may reach a threshold and drive the system to collapse. This process drives the system