Urbanization is the dominant trend of land transformation around the world (Pickett et al. 2010) and involves one of the most extreme forms of land-use alteration (Miller and Hobbs 2002). Urban areas globally cover only 4% of terrestrial surface, but they keep 54% of human population (UN 2014). Urban population growth is occurring more rapidly in less developed regions, mostly located in tropical areas and Latin America. These regions host some of the world’s most biodiversity-rich ecosystems, including several biodiversity hotspots (Pauchard and Barbosa 2013). Although the interest in studying urban systems has increased recently (McKinney 2008; Kowarik 2011; Scheffers and Paszkowski 2012), baseline knowledge is limited in many areas. If the emergence of novel systems in the city represent adaptive responses to the social and ecological conditions in the city (Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2014), the integrated research and understanding of urban ecosystems and their dynamics from a multidisciplinary/social-ecological perspective is critical. Within that context, urban ecosystems constitute an open frontier for ecological research and the new knowledge may help improve overall decision-making for environmental planning, rehabilitation in urban areas, conservation goals in general, and to the development and management of sustainable cities around the world. Given the growing ecological and social importance of urban areas and the fact that cities in tropical regions and in Latin America are expected to continue to expand, there is an urgent need to understand how biodiversity, ecosystem services, and resilience capacity, interplay in and around their cities (Pauchard and Barbosa 2013). This symposium provides a multidisciplinary vision including the social-ecological perspective of current trends, research lines, and advances of urban ecology in tropical regions and Latin America. It offers an opportunity to develop a broader perspective of urban ecology by presenting what the scientific community is addressing on this area in tropical regions and Latin America and how their findings contribute to the understanding of urban socio-ecological systems and the future of urban ecology as discipline.