Selecting independent measures to quantify Melbourne's urban-rural gradient

Abstract

As cities and towns increase in population and size around the world, there is a growing interest in the impact of urbanisation on humans and the environment. The use of urban-rural gradients has proven to be a useful tool for studying changes in ecological patterns and processes across urbanising landscapes. Currently, there are a wide range of measures being used to represent changes in human demographic patterns, physical structures and landscape composition and structure along urban-rural gradients. The aim of this paper was to identify a suite of measures that can be used to define an urban-rural gradient in Melbourne, Australia. Using principal components analysis, we assessed 17 commo..