Conclusions
This study examined the impacts of urban growth on the spatial pattern of crucial ecosystems in an urbanising landscape and provides planning implications to better protect and manage urban ecosystems. Using selected landscape metrics, the study intended to understand how urban ecosystem structure is likely to evolve in response to urbanisation scenarios based on proposed urban development plans. The urbanisation scenario was developed with a consideration of temporal sequences and certainty of urban projects. The short-, mid- and long-term scenarios are relative terms specific to the current points in time in Maricopa County, each of which can be understood as realistic, potential, and extreme conditions of future urbanisation. In total, 384 combinations of landscape metrics were calculated, encompassing four different scenario levels (including baseline), three ecosystem types, one entire landscape, six different landscape metrics, and four ecological distances. The study results demonstrated how the landscape metrics behave with different types of urbanisation options, and which ecosystem type is most likely to be sensitive to fragmentation and ecosystem loss. The usefulness of the methodological approach lies in its predictive capabilities for future ecosystem pattern and associated function at the landscape scale.