Prevalent vegetation growth enhancement in urban environment

Significance Cities experiencing elevated temperature (i.e., urban “heat island” warming), CO 2 , and nitrogen deposition decades ahead of the projected average global change are regarded as the “harbingers” of the future global change. It is for this reason that cities have been regarded as ideal natural laboratories for global change studies and particularly valuable to elucidate the potential responses of other nonurban ecosystems to future climate and environmental changes. However, the impacts of urbanization on vegetation growth are not well understood. We demonstrate, conceptually and empirically, that urbanization generates direct and indirect effects on vegetation growth at the landscape to regional scales.