Life in the City turns 2 years old today (ish)!
In true 2020 fashion, we missed our own birthday, by a whole month!
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, which have more than doubled in the last year. In the last 365 days we have published 147 posts!
Big thanks to our top 3 contributors:
The blog has received a total of 120K hits (increase from last year 48K!) from 49K visitors (up from 16K last year!) and now averages 300 hits per day! We’ve garnered a global audience and have excitedly watched as new dots appear on our global counter (side note, we still need someone from Antarctica to check out our page so we can get a pin on every continent!).
In the past year, we brought you stories on behavioral, morphological, physiological, and genetic differences in urban organisms. We brought you 40 more amazing observations of urban plants and animals like these:
Even with a pandemic, we covered 4 conferences where some made it pre-pandemic in person (#Ent2019, #SICB2020) while others went virtual (#ABS2020, #IALE 2020). We brought you more stickers and had a November Comment Contest to win stickers!
Most Viewed Posts:
In our top viewed post for the year, Kristin Winchell described new research done by Gibbs et al. in their recent paper: “The Biological System—Urban Wildlife, Adaptation, and Evolution: Urbanization as a Driver of Contemporary Evolution in Gray Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis).”
Natural Selection Favors Black Morph of Eastern Gray Squirrel in Cities
Top Twitter Engagements:
Our most liked and retweet post on Twitter was on “The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Systemic Racism in Urban Environments”:
New post about @cschell_canids
et al.'s recent @ScienceMagazine paper on #UrbanEcology, #UrbanEvolution, & the need to consider the consequences of systemic racism https://t.co/O6uZ30ZLF5— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) September 8, 2020
And, post with the highest engagement was about the new stickers Kristin designed:
New @LITC_urbanevo stickers designed by @Kmwinchell. We'll be handing them out when conferences resume. pic.twitter.com/purzdb9pK1
— Life In The City: Urban Evolution (@LITC_urbanevo) March 27, 2020
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. 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!
I am interested in urban ecology and evolution. Urbanization can have drastic impacts on local ecosystems, both negative and positive, and creates a new environment for organisms to experience. To understand the impacts that urbanization plays on organisms, I look through the lense of population genetics and molecular evolution.
- Urban Observation of the Week: Golden Jackal - July 28, 2021
- Urban Observation of the Week: Bellflowers in Munich - July 21, 2021
- Urban Observation of the Week: So Many Plants - July 14, 2021
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