The continuum of urbanity: a synthetic concept for research on urban-rural mixtures

This perspective presents a new framework to improve ecological contributions to understanding how urban, rural, and wild attributes can co-occur and mix within specific locations, producing configurations that cannot be understood through binary contrasts. We focus on mixed conditions and the processes that sustain dynamic mosaics of mixed urban-rural sites. This framework complements others that avoid the urban-rural binary, and supports integrated social and ecological research across landscapes of mixture.