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Is agriculture actually beneficial for avian biodiversity?
It is a common belief that human-modified areas, such as farmlands, support fewer bird species than natural habitats such as forests. However, new research by Zhao et al. (2024) challenges this idea. Their study of bird species diversity on islands…
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Urban Paleontology: The Hidden Diversity in Cities
Many of the posts on this blog discuss the wide variety of life you can find in urban environments. But have you ever considered the diversity you can find in the very stones of the buildings we live in? Depending…
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Urbanization and Local History Affect the Saguaro Cactus in the Sonoran Desert
With the rapid expansion of the city, the degradation of the natural environment has gradually aroused widespread concern in society. In recent years, the saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea), one of the most iconic plants in the Sonoran Desert, has attracted…
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Science Meets Activism: Stream ecology in the wake of the Mountain Valley Pipeline
During the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) 2024 conference, I interviewed Andrea Beverly and Jamie Lau, from Radford University, who are studying how the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is impacting freshwater streams in Rural Virginia.…
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The fox and the bag: a modern fable
A statue of a fox, as long as 16 meters with a height of over 10 meters, with a bag between its teeth sits in the middle of the Dutch city Rotterdam (Smets, 2024). It is locally known as the…
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Reptiles in the city: Should we welcome our reptilian overlords?
Think about a classic urban species. The first ones that come to mind are usually rats, pigeons and cockroaches. I’d bet that less than 10% of people reading this thought of a reptile. With cockroaches (and possibly ants) being the…
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From Twigs to Trash: The Surprising Evolution of Bird Nests
Did you know that it has been estimated that the anthropogenic mass, representing all human-made objects, would exceed the living biomass in 2020 ± 6 years? Each year, humans accumulate 30 Gigatons of anthropogenic mass, based on the averages of…
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Wall Lovers: Plants that can turn canal walls into urban ‘rock gardens’
Urban environments consist mostly of bricks, concrete, asphalt, metal and glass: not very alluring substrates for many terrestrial organisms. Certain mosses and lichens can be seen sometimes on walls in the city, but even they will not easily grow in…
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