The long-awaited first textbook on urban evolution, Urban Evolutionary Biology, was released this summer. This fantastic text features chapters written by several of the contributors to this blog, and came together with the hard work of three urban evolution researchers: editors Marta Szulkin, Jason Munshi-South, and Anne Charmantier. We got together (virtually) with Marta, Jason, and Anne to pick their brains about urban evolution and their new book.
First up, we asked them a little about themselves and their research to get an idea of how they got started working in urban ecosystems.
Marta: My background is strongly based in the analysis of long-term datasets of wild bird populations (mostly blue tits and great tits). Originally, I worked on datasets and in the field while in Oxford, UK (as PhD student and postdoctoral research fellow) and in Montpellier in France (as postdoctoral research fellow). The urban dimension of life had interested me for a while at a personal level, which at some point morphed into a realization of the amazing potential of cities as testing ground for evolutionary biology. It was upon my decision to return to Poland that I decided to transfer all of my research focus to the urban dimension of evolutionary biology.
Anne: My background is very similar to Marta’s, in fact we have collaborated several times before (I was a PhD student in Montpellier, a postdoc in Oxford and then a PI in Montpellier again). I have been working for 15 years on fundamental questions in evolutionary ecology using long term datasets of birds (blue tits, great tits, mute swans, wandering albatrosses, common terns and other seabirds). In particular, I have been exploring the processes involved in avian adaptation to climate change. Eight years ago, I realized that studying avian adaptation to urbanization offered huge potential, and I joined a project set up in my hometown of Montpellier. I saw a lot of parallels and synergies between studying adaptation to climate change and to urbanization and developed a keen interest in Urban Evolutionary Biology.
Jason: When I moved to New York City in 2007 for my first faculty position, I wanted to start a local research program that would involve undergraduate students in both laboratory and field work. I decided to study the population genetics of native rodents in urban parks, as I was already doing similar studies in different contexts. Shortly thereafter, I became very interested in the emerging field of landscape genetics, and sought to apply these approaches to understanding how animals move through and spread their genes in urban landscapes. This research eventually led to the use of population genomics to examine potential local adaptation in urban populations. These initial studies on native white-footed mice led to future work on invasive rats in NYC and around the world, as well as a number of student-driven projects on other taxa in the NYC area, such as coyotes, salamanders, and pigeons.
Urban research is not without its surprises. We asked Marta, Anne, and Jason to share an interesting encounter they had while conducting urban fieldwork. Their responses highlight the surprising connections we make with the public while working in urban spaces.
Marta: One of our study sites where we monitor bird breeding events is set in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. The place is very peaceful, essentially a very large, forested cemetery. I was walking to a nestbox in a very secluded area where there is usually no one around. Suddenly, a spectacled, older man looking like the twin brother of Steven Spielberg appears from the bushes and tombstones with a large grin on his face and said in English “I found him!!”. Turns out he was looking for his relatives buried in the cemetery, and had been spending regular time in Warsaw to reconstruct the life of his family from before the war. Speaking to him in that place, surrounded by tombstones and lush vegetation, felt absolutely surreal.
Anne: Most of our ‘funny’ field stories come from encounters with humans: discussing garden birds with passersby, chasing our ladder after someone in the street who is trying to take it away in the middle of a capturing session, having to yell our observations from the top of the ladder to the field assistant taking notes because the traffic is so loud. But this year, what surprised me the most, paradoxically for field work, were the uncommon wild encounters because of lockdown. During one of my capture sessions, I was hiding in a bush waiting for a great tit to enter a nest-box where I wanted to capture it and band it, when I saw a beautiful fox walking towards me, completely relaxed and off guard. While foxes are quite common in some urban areas in the UK, I had never seen one in my hometown of Montpellier, and it was a magic encounter, triggered by the absence of pedestrians at what should have been a busy morning commute time. I held my breath until the fox rose his gaze and saw me less than 2m away from him, after which he vanished in a second.
Jason: I have had many negative encounters while conducting field work in NYC, such as coming upon crime scenes and having a police officer point a gun in my face. However, I more often think about the daily interactions I have had with New Yorkers that are genuinely interested in urban wildlife, and want to share their stories about rats, raccoons, squirrels etc. One of my graduate students and I also came upon a person walking a pet duck, which was a funny sight!
Of course, we all have our favorite urban organisms. As experts in the field of urban evolution, we asked them about their favorite urban species and their thoughts on what species are overrated and underrated.
Marta: Sparrows (Passer sp.) and tits (Parus sp. and Cyanistes sp.) are my favorite animals as one can see them easily and they generate the urban songlines of European cities – their calls, during the breeding season and outside of it, are what makes wildlife visible to many humans in the urban space. The most underrated urban organism are perhaps urban pollinators – we are slowly awakening to the need of actively maximizing living space for these organisms. I am also relieved to see that many urban authorities are becoming increasingly aware of the need to reduce grass mowing, which increases their food base and creates ecological corridors for gene flow.
Anne: I would have many animals to put in each category, and I am a bit reluctant to give only one. As a field ornithologist, I mainly think of our beautiful birds, but I will try a complementary answer from Marta. One of my favorite urban animals is the red squirrel, perhaps because it is one of only a handful of non-domesticated diurnal mammals that can be seen in our cities, and also because it is becoming a rare sight in several European countries because of the introduced eastern grey squirrel, which is bigger and dominant. In the underrated section, I think of bats, since they still largely carry a sinister reputation, when in fact they are intelligent fascinating and useful mammals: we should be thankful for their presence, if only because they feed on mosquitoes!
Jason: The raccoon is probably my favorite urban species, as it is an extremely clever and attractive animal that may be on its way to evolving deeper relationships with people and our cities (much as red foxes may be doing in the UK and Europe). The domesticated Mandarin duck that showed up in Central Park a while back is probably the most overrated urban animal in recent memory.
Next we got down to business and asked the three editors to tell us more about the book, starting with how they came up with the idea to collaborate with each other to make it happen.
Marta: Anne and I organised the first symposium on urban evolution at an ESEB (European Society for Evolutionary Biology) congress at exactly the same time that Jason organised a symposium on urban evolution in the US at an Evolution (SSE/ASN/SSB) meeting.
Jason: As Marta mentioned, I organized a symposium with Emily Puckett sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evolution at the Portland Evolution conference in June 2017. At the time, I had not made much personal contact with people studying urban evolution in Europe so I was very excited to receive Marta and Anne’s invitation to speak at their ESEB symposium that August. We met for the first time there.
Marta: Jason was a keynote speaker at our symposium and the symposium received quite a bit of interest at the conference. I was approached by an editor, and we all agreed that it was the right time to think about a book that synthesizes what we know in the field.
Anne: When Marta and I started discussing the book project, we wanted to include in the project someone working outside birds, and preferentially outside Europe. Jason was a perfect candidate to join us.
With their unique experiences and expertise, they set out to bring the text together. We wanted to know what their goal was for the text and who they envisioned the target audience to be.
Our goal was to provide a synthesis of what is known in the field of urban evolutionary biology. We aimed to reach the general audience of evolutionary biologists interested in testing evolutionary hypotheses in the urban environment. This includes more experienced researchers, but also undergraduate and graduate biology students and urban wildlife practitioners concerned with maximizing the evolutionary potential of wildlife in cities. To cater for this wide community of biologists, we also included a detailed glossary, which allows to easily catch up with more technical terms.
While the book synthesizes what has already been discovered by urban evolutionary biologists, there are also several chapters that address future questions such as the extent to which evolution occurs in parallel across cities, or the potential evolutionary effects of urbanization on human beings.
Urban Evolutionary Biology is the first academic book summarizing the most up-to-date knowledge in the field. We hope that thanks to the breadth of research topics, illustrations, glossary and topical textboxes, the book will inspire students and more seasoned evolutionary biologists wishing to start research in an urban environment.
With so many exciting topics arising in the young field, it must have been hard to decide what to include. We asked them to tell us more about the topics covered.
We worked hard to cover all evolutionary biology themes for which there was enough research on in the urban space. This includes concepts such as parallel evolution, the genetics of adaptation, or urban-driven sexual selection.
We give context and provide useful methodological frameworks. We introduce the readers to important concepts in evolutionary biology that are likely to be particularly relevant in the urban space – such as parallel evolution or the genetics of adaptation. Depending on the chapter, urban evolutionary biology is discussed at the species level or in the context of metacommunities and mutualist interactions, and using plant and animal study systems in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The contributors discuss possible urban-driven changes in life-history or physiology (for example due to the heat island effect), body morphology or locomotion (because of changes in land cover)– and set out to confirm these predictions by reviewing evidence in the literature, performing meta-analyses and reporting on experiments testing such predictions on the ground.
An added bonus is that there are beautiful illustrations of these different themes, which open up the door for graphical naturalist exploration of the urban space. The illustrator, Alli Fitzmorris, is a graduate of Fordham University in NYC and continues to be involved in various educational and research projects in ecology and evolution.
On what each of them were excited most about in the text…
Marta: The urban heat island effect, leading to warmer temperatures in concrete-heavy environments, is a fascinating framework for urban evolutionary biology as it is an immutable attribute of all cities — though it can be attenuated or exacerbated depending on the amount of vegetation present. It thus has a strong potential for replication. It is also interesting conceptually as it occurs on a spatial scale (across urban rural gradients), and thus mirrors climate change which acts on a temporal scale. Work on heat-island driven changes has been measured in many taxa, in many cities, and easily lends itself to experimental work.
Anne: Related to this urban heat island effect which is found repeatedly in all the cities across the world, the urban space offers an exciting perspective to test for parallel evolution. When confronted with similar constraints such as light, air or sound pollution, will the same organism evolve in the same way in different cities? Will the genetic underpinnings of this adaptation be similar?
Jason: I agree with Anne. I also am intrigued by the idea of future evolutionary change in humans or other organisms such as raccoons and pests.
And what they were not able to cover but wish they did.
Marta: For quite a few really interesting questions, there was not enough data to justify chapters – but I am confident this will change in the next few years. Themes that were not included: cities as drivers of change in baseline levels of mutation rate in urban-dwelling organisms, urban microbiome evolution, and evolution occurring in urban harbors. We also need more theory, or at least some “translation work” that would allow to customize classical evolutionary and evolutionary ecology models to the reality of urban space.
Jason: I wish we had been able to explicitly address how variation in the cultural, social, and economic attributes of human communities may drive evolutionary responses in cities. This research is in its infancy, but I expect major findings to be published in the next decade.
Lastly, we asked them will there be a follow up text?
Definitely! Can’t wait to see what new directions of research will emerge in the next few years, and how these will complement our current understanding of urban-driven evolution. Not only will this substantiate evolutionary biology as a basic science, we also hope it will allow us to apply an evolutionary angle to urban-based applied conservation practices.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Urban Evolutionary Biology yet, you can learn more about it and pick up a copy from Oxford University Press and Amazon.
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