2018 in Review

Thanks for following Life in the City in our first year. On this last day of 2018 we (the editors: Elizabeth, Kristin, Lindsay) figured we would take a moment to reflect on the first few months of the blog and urban evolution research over the past year.

The Blog

Since launching on September 28, we’ve published 32 posts from 12 contributors. We’ve reached over 2,500 hits.

We’ve hope to engage our readers and stimulate conversation by encouraging comments and discussion. We’re on Facebook and Twitter where we try to keep the conversations going (have you followed us yet?). On Twitter we’ve now surpassed 150 followers – not bad for only a couple of months! The top liked and retweeted posts were:

1. Broadening participation in urban evolution

Hey Everyone! I wrote a blog about broadening participation in #urbanevolution, identity, & community. As urban ecologists we have a lot of power to involve folks on the margins. Thanks @LITC_urbanevo for the chance to contribute! #BLACKandSTEM #STEM #URM #urbanecology @uwtacoma https://t.co/svung7A06K

— Christopher Schell (@cschell_canids) November 19, 2018

2. Natural history of urban organisms

Often times natural history studies are overlooked. @Kmwinchell makes the case that these studies are essential for understanding #UrbanEvolution. https://t.co/SvU3UzAEyU

— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) December 3, 2018

3. Urban genes

What genes are under selection in urban organisms? @Kmwinchell summarizes what we know about #UrbanEvolution and adaption studies in our new post. https://t.co/t31NVFX4Tt

— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) December 17, 2018

4. Thermal tolerance in urban ants

New post about parallel/non-parallel evolution, & thermal tolerance in urban #ants. This post, by @Kmwinchell, covers a recent paper by @sarah_e_diamond, @lacydchick, A. Perez, S. Strickler, & @RyanAMartin in the @RSocPublishing #UrbanEvolution issue. https://t.co/DctkmG4Er2

— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) October 5, 2018

 

But our posts covered far more topics than just these four posts. Our contributors have been covering a broad range of topics, summarized by this word cloud of ALL of our posts for the year:

The Research

2018 was a great year for urban evolution research. Some highlights:

• Johnson & Munshi-South Science paper kicked off 2018 with a bang! With 69 citations and counting, this paper will surely continue to be an important contribution to the growing field.
• Of course, this wasn’t the only review to come out this year on urban evolution! Rivkin et al. (2018) came out in mid-November. To write this paper, a group of around 30 urban biologists (including many of the contributors to this blog) got together in Toronto and brainstormed about the past, present, and future of the field of urban evolution.
• And if readers were looking for more primary research on urban organisms, 2018 didn’t disappoint on that front either. In August, Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a special issue on urban evolution, featuring fantastic studies of urban plants, mammals, herptiles, invertebrates, and more! We’re still digging our way through this issue, but in 2019 we will continue to feature summaries of these contributed papers.

The Editors

Aside from launching this blog (which is a lot of work!), the editors have been busy with their own urban evolution research.

Lindsay graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with her PhD in Integrative Life Science, moved to Canada to start a postdoc at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and published her first, first author paper.

Kristin graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with her PhD in Biology. She recently moved to St. Louis, MO to start a postdoc at Washington University. She has been busy traveling the world for conferences and field work! She continues to study urban lizards, and some of her research was recently featured on a Smithsonian Channel documentary. She is also launching new projects on furry warm-blooded urban animals in St. Louis.

Elizabeth put thousands of miles on her car while collecting pigeon samples for her PhD research — this included traveling to cities all over the eastern USA (Boston, MA twice; Providence, RI; New Haven, CT twice; Bridgeport, CT; Philadelphia, PA twice; Baltimore, MD twice;  & Washington, DC three times). In April, the Society for the Study of Evolution sponsored her to attend the American Institute for Biological Sciences Congressional Visits Day where she met with congressional representatives and senators from New York and Connecticut. In July she flew to South Korea to attend the Ewha-Luce International Seminar which brought together 22 graduate students from North American and Asia to share their research and foster community among women in STEM. She finished off the year by extracting and preparing ddRAD libraries for ~475 samples for her dissertation. Throughout the year she was featured on WNYC, WFUV, Science Friday, and in the New York Times.

 

And the rest of our contributors? Learn more about them on the contributor page, or better yet, become a contributor yourself in 2019!

We’ll see you next year, kicking it off with a flurry of posts this next week as we cover our first conference as a blog: SICB. Happy New Year to you all!