Quantifying landscape patterns of urban–rural regional systems: comparing concentric and transect approaches

The urban–rural regional system (URRS)—a mosaic of urban, rural, and transitional areas connected through socioeconomic and ecological processes—constitutes a key spatial domain for the science and practice of landscape ecology and regional sustainability. However, we still lack an adequate understanding of how spatial sampling schemes (e.g., concentric rings vs. transects) and spatiotemporal and thematic scales jointly affect the quantification of spatial patterns across the URRS as an integrat