This paper positions urban ecology as increasingly conversant with multiple perspectives and methods for understanding the functions and qualities of diverse cities and urban situations. Despite progress in the field, we need clear pathways for positioning, connecting and synthesising specific knowledge and to make it speak to more systemic questions about cities and the life within them. These pathways need to be able to make use of diverse sources of information to better account for the diverse relations between people, other species and the ecological, social, cultural, economic, technical and increasingly digital structures that they are embedded in. Grounded in a description of the systemic knowledge needed, we propose five complementary and often connected approaches for building cumulative systemic understandings, and a framework for connecting and combining different methods and evidence. The approaches and the framework help position urban ecology and other fields of study as entry points to further advance interdisciplinary synthesis and open up new fields of research.

本文将城市生态学定位为越来越熟悉多种视角和方法来理解不同城市和城市状况的功能和品质。尽管该领域取得了进展，但我们需要明确的途径来定位、连接和综合特定知识，并使其解决有关城市及其生活的更系统的问题。这些途径需要能够利用不同的信息来源，以更好地解释人类、其他物种及其所嵌入的生态、社会、文化、经济、技术和日益数字化的结构之间的多样化关系。在描述所需的系统知识时，我们提出了五种互补且经常相互联系的方法来建立累积的系统理解，以及一个连接和组合不同方法和证据的框架。这些方法和框架有助于将城市生态学和其他研究领域定位为进一步推进跨学科综合并开辟新研究领域的切入点。