Top 10 Urban Evolutionary Ecology Papers of 2022

Humans are now the dominant driver of evolution. Most contemporary examples of rapid evolution in nature stem from the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on populations. A prominent example of this is how urbanization affects species’ evolution. This topic has received substantial attention since 2016, with many scholars turning their research attention to the topic. Part of the appeal and importance of urban evolutionary ecology is that it shines a light on how an esoteric topic of fascination to naturalists for two centuries is now important for human society, as well as the life living around and sometimes on or even in us. The study of urban evolutionary ecology allows for and increasingly requires an intersection of tools between evolutionary biology, ecology, social sciences, physical sciences, and other disciplines too. While the research has important implications for fundamental questions in biology, it also has tangible applied consequences for conservation, disease ecology, ecosystem science, climate science, sustainability, urban planning, wildlife and human health, and economics.  

We scoured the literature to try and find all papers published on urban evolutionary ecology from 2022. What follows is a list of the 10 empirical and/or theory papers that we thought were most novel and scientifically rigorous. The end of this short article includes a brief description of our methodology. Review papers were not included in our ranking, but we refer to these important contributions at the end.

10. Lewis et al, J Pest Science – PhD student Cari Lewis, Prof. Warren Booth and colleagues showed that bed bug populations across the USA evolved increased resistance to insecticides in ~10y. This study builds on previous work examining the worldwide spread of pesticide resistance and the results presented here have important implications for understanding the evolution of human pests and improving management strategies. We particularly appreciated how the authors were able to document recent evolution in action over time.

9. Friis et al, Molecular Ecology – Dr. Friis and company performed extensive analysis on genome-wide sequence data of dark-eyed juncos to understand the origin of a recent urban colonizer (dark-eyed junco), including the demographic processes and putative selection that has shaped its early urban existence. We particularly appreciated how this study builds on the classic work of Prof. Pamela Yeh in a novel way. Yeh’s work provided one of the earlier examples of urban adaptation in the literature, and this paper shows this system still has the ability to teach us new things about the evolution and ecology of urban living.

8. Diamond, Martin, et al, Biological J of the Linnean Society – Using meticulous experiments that carefully controlled temperatures and quantitative genetic variation, Profs. Sarah Diamond, Ryan Martin and collaborators show that Drosophila tripunctata has rapidly evolved increased heat tolerance & lower cold resistance to urban warming. Their use of the model genus Drosophila may allow for a mechanistic understanding of adaptation to cities.

7. Caizergues et al, Evolutionary Applications – Dr. Aude Caizergues et al. show that both genetic and epigenetic mechanisms are involved in adaptation of the song bird (great tit) to urban environments across three European cities. Their results suggest that these putative “adaptations” are polygenic, shaped by a combination of selection and epigenetically mediated plasticity, and these genetic and epigenetic changes associated with urbanization are mostly nonparallel among the cities examined.

6. Blumenfeld et al, Molecular Ecology – Dr. Alex Blumenfeld & collaborators show that a native ant (Tapinoma sessile) that invades cities exhibits shifts in its mating system in urban environments. Ant colonies in cities were more likely to have many queens, which might help them succeed in novel environments. Extensive phylogenetic and chemical analyses also show strong differentiation between urban and nonurban populations, which might be explained by a combination of barriers due to dispersal and novel selection on urban populations.

5. Maraci et al, Scientific Reports – Dr. Öncü Maraci and colleagues show that urban environments alter the structure and decrease the diversity of gut microbes of great tits, a song bird. Their results also show that birds breeding in nest boxes have altered gut microbiomes compared to birds nesting in natural cavities. Their results help open the door to understanding how cities reshape microbial communities that organisms depend on.

4. Iglesias-Carrasco et al, Global Ecology and Biogeography – Dr. Maider Iglesias-Carrasco and company provide a macroevolutionary perspective on urban life. They perform comparative phylogenetic analyses on a phylogeny of birds comprising a global sample of >900 species, which was originally assembled by Sol et al. In the present paper, they discover that birds that are most successful in cities come from lineages with historically higher speciation and lower extinction rates, whereas those that are least successful stem from lineages with historically lower diversification rates. These findings could help to predict how urban development will impact species and communities, and perhaps build cities that are more sustainable for all life.

3. Cosentino and Gibbs, Scientific Reports – Profs. Cosentino and Gibbs made a novel and productive use of community science data to collect information on >60K grey squirrels from 43 cities in North America. They studied how the Mendelian controlled coat colour morph (black versus grey) varies along urban-rural gradients. They find that there are frequently positive clines in the frequency of black morphs with increased urbanization, but there is also a lot of variation in the strength and direction of urban-rural clines, which is explained by city size, forest cover & climate.

2. Schmidt and Garroway, Proceedings of the National Academy USA – Dr. Chloé Schmidt and Prof. Colin Garroway show that across diverse vertebrates & cities across North America, neighbourhoods with fewer white residents are associated with lower genetic diversity within vertebrate populations & greater differentiation between populations. The effect sizes are small, but nevertheless their findings are stunning, remarkable & profound, especially given the short period of time over which these effects could have occurred and their consistency across diverse cities and taxa. Their findings indicate that socioeconomic and urban planning decisions in cities associated with systemic racism can have unintended, far-reaching and largely negative effects on the ecology & evolution of wildlife.

1. Santangelo et al, Science – Our top urban evolution paper of 2022 is Dr. Santangelo et al.’s Global Urban Evolution study published in Science. This large collaboration involved 287 coauthors who together studied phenotypic & genomic evolution of the white clover plant in 160 cities on six continents. They sampled >110K plants from >7K populations. The authors found convergent environmental change in cities on a global scale, and plant populations frequently evolved genetic and phenotypic changes in a Mendelian controlled antiherbivore defence trait that was explained by adaptation to environmental gradients in vegetation (probably related to herbivory) and drought. Their results show the global scale & repeatability of urban environmental and evolutionary change. This paper received a lot of previous media coverage, and the backstory of this work can be found at www.globalurbanevolution.com and the blog linked from that website.

We hope you enjoyed our 2022 Top 10 list of empirical urban evolution papers. As this list cannot include all of the great urban evolutionary ecology papers of the year, for further reading here is a link to 114 papers we found from 2022.

While our Top 10 list of 2022 urban evolutionary ecology papers focused on empirical and theoretical works, there were also several important & notable reviews. Here is a link to 15 urban evolution & urban evolutionary ecology reviews from 2022.

METHODOLOGY

If you are wondering how we came up with this list, here is a short description of our approach. We started by looking at the most highly cited urban evolution and urban evoeco papers (e.g. Johnson and Munshi-South, 2017; Alberti et al. 2015, etc..) , and pulled out every paper that cited these papers in 2022 as listed on Google Scholar. We then looked at each paper to determine whether it studied evolutionary ecology in or around cities.

We then performed a series of Web of Science searches of various terms relating to urban evolution, and pulled out all relevant papers from 2022. This involved a lot of combinations of terms including various mechanisms of evolution (e.g. mutation, gene flow, dispersal, genetic drift, bottleneck, etc.), and terms related to cities (e.g., urban, urbanization, city, cities, suburb*, etc.). While we may have missed a handful of papers, in the end our searches were pulling out the same papers we already identified. 

We then scored each paper independently, giving one score each for novelty (e.g. has this been done before) and another score for rigour (e.g. replication, genomic/analytical methods). We added these two scores to make a composite novelty + rigour score, normalized our individual scores & summed them between the two of us. 

We finally sorted this list to get the Top 10 Urban Evolution list of 2022. 

We should note that we intentionally did not rank papers from our EvoEco Lab, which you can find at www.evoeco.org. We are of course fans of our own work, but since we could not be objective in ranking these papers we thought it best to leave them out. The single exception to this was the Global Urban Evolution study, which we included because it involved so many collaborators and we felt it was an important contribution in 2022 by all objective measures.  

That’s it! Thanks to all that published their great science in 2022. We can’t wait for 2023! 

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Marc Johnson

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