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How does urban sprawl change the land around cities?
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Crowds of people in Tokyo's Shibuya shopping district.
Urban sprawl significantly alters the land surrounding cities by converting natural environments into human-dominated landscapes. This process involves the transformation of forests, wetlands, and other biomes into areas dedicated to residential, commercial, and industrial use.1
Key changes to the land include:
- Habitat Destruction and Fragmentation: Natural land is cleared, graded, and paved, destroying wildlife habitats. Remaining natural areas are often fragmented into small, isolated patches, creating "edge habitats" that are suboptimal for many specialist species.21
- Increased Impermeable Surfaces: The construction of roads, parking lots, and buildings replaces water-absorbing vegetation and soil with impermeable surfaces. This impedes natural water infiltration, leading to increased surface runoff, local flooding, and the transport of pollutants into downstream ecosystems.213
- Landscape Modification: To support infrastructure, natural streams are often channeled for drainage, and the physical topography is frequently altered to accommodate standardized housing tracts and transportation networks.21
- Environmental Degradation: The expansion of the urban footprint contributes to higher levels of air and water pollution, as well as the introduction of exotic species, which further degrades the ecological health of the surrounding rural or wild land.21