Rural Ecology: An emerging discipline for the rural sustainable development

The essential goal of rural revitalization is to promote the sustainable development of rural areas, which needs to integrate the theory of ecological hierarchy and scale. In this paper, the authors propose to construct a discipline of Rural Ecology (RE), together with Urban Ecology to form a completely geographical imagine of Ecology. The disciplinarities of RE are positioned as interdisciplinary approaches under a transdisciplinary model that integrates Agroecology, Landscape Ecology, Socio-ecology, and Political Ecology, aiming at building a sustainable rural ecosystem, i.e. addressing the ecological nexus between the peasants and their living & producing environment. The research scale of RE covers the vertical and horizontal scales of the rural ecosystem, and its core content is to study the material, energy, information, value and human resource flow of the rural ecosystem, the landscape at the urban-rural interface in particular to reveal the flow and loss of the peasants’ labor value. Finally, the authors put forward an analytical framework of RE for the sustainable development of rural areas, hotspots and four levels of transformation for the construction of sustainable rural ecosystems in China, i.e, reconstructing a sustainable rural ecosystem by revaluing the multi-functionalities of agriculture, reorganizing the agricultural industry, recycling the agricultural resources and innovating food production technology in sequence.