  The notion of bounded expansion captures uniform sparsity of graph classes
and renders various algorithmic problems that are hard in general tractable. In
particular, the model-checking problem for first-order logic is fixed-parameter
tractable over such graph classes. With the aim of generalizing such results to
dense graphs, we introduce classes of graphs with structurally bounded
expansion, defined as first-order interpretations of classes of bounded
expansion. As a first step towards their algorithmic treatment, we provide
their characterization analogous to the characterization of classes of bounded
expansion via low treedepth decompositions, replacing treedepth by its dense
analogue called shrubdepth.
