Life in the City turns 1 year old today!
Thank you all for following our blog. We are very proud of how it has grown and owe a huge thank you to our amazing contributors. In the last 365 days we have published 147 posts! The blog has received a total of 48K hits from 16K visitors and now averages 200 hits per day! We’ve garnered a global audience and have excitedly watched as new dots appear on our global counter (side note, someone from Antarctica should check out our page so we can get a pin on every continent! Or better yet, does someone who works in Antarctica want to tell us about the impacts of humans on wildlife down there?).
In the past year, we brought you stories on behavioral, morphological, physiological, and genetic differences in urban organisms. We brought you 37 amazing observations of urban plants and animals. We debated how best to define “urbanization” (check out: Urbanization: Beyond Where the Sidewalk Ends and Defining Urbanization: A New Conceptual Framework). We covered 3 conferences (Evolution 2019, SICB 2019, and IUWC 2019) with 45 conference talk posts! And we brought you stickers!
Most Viewed Posts:
In our two top viewed posts for the year, Kristin Winchell described new research done by Luca Santini et al. in their recent paper: “One strategy does not fit all: determinants of urban adaptation in mammals”, and by James Baxter-Gilbert and colleagues on urban Australian water dragons (Intellagama lesueurii) in their recent paper: “Bold New World: urbanization promotes an innate behavioral trait in a lizard“.
We also noticed that our readers were big fans of the great post by Kevin Aviles-Rodriguez on research by Luis de Leon into the many ways intensifying urbanization in the Galapagos is impacting Darwin’s finches.
The Future of Darwin’s Finches with Intensifying Urbanization
Top Twitter Engagements:
Our most liked post on Twitter was on the importance of integrating natural history into urban evolutionary studies:
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
And our most retweeted post was about identifying genes under selection in urban organisms:
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
Finally, our top clicked post from Twitter was by Christopher Schell on working with community members to be a more equitable scientist:
How do we broaden participation in our research? @cschell_canids discusses the human side of #urbanevolution in a new post: https://t.co/VeYc1ogz4X
— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) November 19, 2018
Building an Urban Evolution Community
Most importantly, we like to think that we have helped to grow the urban evolution community into a more inclusive and communicative community. Our field is young but growing and we believe we have the opportunity here to be a bridge for researchers from all over the world working on diverse systems and using a multitude of study approaches. We love how we have posts that are focused on ecology, others are heavy on evolution, and others tackle social aspects of urbanization. We love that we have tackled greater issues here such as “the human side of urban evolution” and “attitudes towards wildlife in urban communities“, but also bringing you practical information such as “fieldwork on private property getting started” and “staying safe“. And most of all, we love that we have made new connections and friends all over the world and hope that we have helped bring this community together. Here’s to many more LITC birthdays!
- New Lit Alert: Urban environment determines population genetics in the green toad, Bufotes viridis - September 11, 2023
- Contribute to the New York Canid Project! - July 21, 2023
- Parallel Urban Adaptation from Phenotype to Genotype in Anolis Lizards - January 19, 2023