With the expansion of major cities and development of small towns (i.e.,regional urbanization),cities and their surrounding regions are increasingly facing serious problems,such as environmental pollution,ecological degradation,and resource shortages.This is particularly true in rapidly developing countries such as China.To solve these problems,it is crucially important to better understand the social and ecological connections between cities and their surrounding regions.This is because cities and their surrounding regions are integrated,socially and ecologically.On the one hand,urban sustainability can only be achieved with the support of the surrounding region.Conversely,urban sustainability plays a key role in region sustainability.This paper presents a comprehensive review on the social and ecological connections between cities and surrounding regions,with the goal of enhancing our understanding of the social and ecological linkages between cities and their surrounding regions.We reviewed literature,and loosely grouped studies into three categories:1) direct and indirect (e.g.,through social processes) effects of urban development on ecosystems and environments at urban and regional scales;2) ecosystem services provided by surrounding regions that support the development of cities;and 3) the social,economic,and ecological teleconnections and interactions between the city and its surrounding region.We further summarized and highlighted a few future directions that should be focused on to advance our understanding of the social and ecological connections between cities and regions:1) Most of the studies focused on the (adverse) impacts of urbanization (particularly urban land expansion) on surrounding regions.Few studies have considered the city and its surrounding regions as a coupled system and taken a holistic approach to examine their mutually supportive and interactive connections.Developing a holistic approach that considers the city and its surrounding regions as a coupled socio-ecological system will greatly enhance our understanding of the social and ecological connections between the two areas.2) Most of the previous studies focused on the social and economic linkages between cities and their surrounding regions,but ignored the ecological connections.Future research on the ecological linkages between cities and surrounding regions,and how the ecological linkages contribute to urban and regional sustainability is highly desirable.3) Currently,there are many new frameworks emerging that are potentially useful to understanding the linkages between cities and surrounding regions,such as the teleconnection/tele-coupling framework and the urban-rural continuum framework.However,quantitative approaches and models,as well as experimental case studies,are largely lacking,which warrants future research.