As of 2018, 55% of the world’s human population lives in villages, towns, or cities, and this figure grows annually as people increasingly adopt the urban lifestyle. The environmental consequences of this urban expansion are vast: grasslands, forests, and wetlands are replaced by roads, sidewalks, and buildings that make up the residential and commercial infrastructure... Continue Reading →
Evolution 2019: Evolutionary Rescue from Extreme Environmental Pollution Enabled by Recent Adaptive Introgression of Highly Advantageous Haplotypes
Humans often drive quick and pronounced changes to the environment. When faced with novel environmental stressors, natural populations must adapt to changing conditions, migrate to a new location to avoid the stressors, or face extinction. Adaptation to stressful environments can arise through a number of mechanisms. First, populations can adapt using genetic variation already present... Continue Reading →
Evolution 2019: Urban Coyotes are Genetically Distinct from and Less Diverse than Coyotes in Natural Habitats
Habitat fragmentation associated with urbanisation if often thought to limit the movement of mobile species, potentially leading to genetically distinct clusters of individuals across a city. Identifying the landscape features that act as barriers to dispersal and drive population differentiation has become a central goal in recent urban evolution research. Javier Monzón, an assistant professor... Continue Reading →
Evolution 2019: Biodiversity and Invaders on Marine Artificial Structures
With increased human movement across the globe comes the increased risk of transporting exotic species, which may establish and disrupt local native communities. In marine environments, boats are frequent vectors for the movement of exotic species, which often get transported across regions in ship’s ballast water, as has occurred with invasive Zebra mussels in North... Continue Reading →
Proc. B Special Issue: Can Random Processes Drive Parallel Evolutionary Responses to Cities?
Continuing our coverage of the recent Proc. B Special Issue on urban evolution, James Santangelo (PhD candidate at University of Toronto Mississauga) tells us about his recent manuscript: One of the outstanding questions in evolutionary biology concerns the extent to which different species — or different populations of a single species — evolve the same genes or... Continue Reading →