Evolution in an Urbanizing World
Entomology 2019 I recently attended the Entomology Conference in St. Louis, Missouri and here are some of the highlights. I was part of the special symposium "What Everyone Ought to Know about Insect Biodiversity in the Urban Environment" where a number of scientists gave talks and posters about their research related to this topic. Biodiversity... Continue Reading →
Recently, I published a review paper in Molecular Ecology with my co-authors, Ruth Rivkin, Marc TJ Johnson, Jason Munshi-South, and Brian Verrelli. In this paper, we discussed how urbanization influences gene flow and genetic drift. We looked at 167 primary literature papers to see what researchers have found. Competing Models of Urban Effects You might... Continue Reading →
This week's post comes from Dale Stevens, who tells us about the effects of elevated urban temperatures on black widow spiders. Along with landscape changes, urbanization also leads to a significant increase in temperature. Human-made surfaces retain heat during the day and stay hot well into the night. Because of this, animals that thrive in... Continue Reading →
Life in the City turns 1 year old today! 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. In the last 365 days we have published 147 posts! The blog has received a total of 48K hits from 16K... Continue Reading →
Recently, LITC contributor Sophie Brietbart and myself published a review in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution as part of a special issue on Arthropod Interactions and Responses to Disturbance in a Changing World. Changes to the biotic and abiotic environment via urbanization present challenges not only to herbivorous arthropods, but also their host plants and... Continue Reading →
Urban evolution can have different meanings depending on what field you come from. If you are an urban planner, it might mean that urban areas are getting larger, even using sustainable energy sources where they didn't previously. For some architects it may mean that they now figure out how to put green roofs on buildings.... Continue Reading →
With increased urbanization across the globe comes more invasive species. Humans accidentally bring pests with them when they travel across the world. The highly invasive Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, has been found in Wake County, North Carolina. Emily Reed, a graduate student at NC State, collected mosquito eggs from 15 sites across Wake County... Continue Reading →
As you may have guessed by now, urbanization changes the natural landscape and this can have consequences for the organisms that live in them. Feral pigeons, which had been domesticated thousands of years ago and transported globally by humans, are not immune to rapid urbanization impacts. Previous studies have shown that there can be inbreeding... Continue Reading →
The percent of impervious surface increases as you move from rural to urban areas, with city centers having the highest percent impervious surface. In a Megapolis like New York CIty, there is a gradient from the core of the city to less urban areas. There is typically less available habitat for plants to grow in... Continue Reading →
Fragmentation of habitat patches is one of many consequences that occurs due to urbanization. This fragmentation can lead to isolated populations that are completely surrounded by urban structures. This isolation can happen on relatively quick timescales, as quickly as 30 years! Due to the loss of habitat patches available for nesting, there can be plant-pollinator... Continue Reading →
This post is part of our series covering the large number of urban evolution manuscripts that were published in August 2018 in the special issue "The Evolution of City Life" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Urbanization can create new pathways of introduction for invasive species. The recently introduced invasive grass Brachypodium... Continue Reading →
A recent article published in Conservation Genetics by Gizelle Hurtado and Karen Mabry found that even low levels of urbanization can influence genetic structure of Merriam's kangaroo rat. Researchers collected the kangaroo rats from Las Cruces, NM in 5 urban and 5 non-urban sites to compare genetic diversity and genetic structure between the two habitat... Continue Reading →
For those of you who follow us and live in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), I'm giving a talk at the Riverwood Conservancy this Saturday, April 20th at 9:30 am. You can register for the event here. I will be talking about how urbanization can influence evolution for a lot of different organisms, including plants... Continue Reading →
As a scientist that works in the field of urban evolution I often have to consider, "what makes an urban habitat?" While this seems like a fairly easy question to answer, there's actually a lot of different ways that we consider urban habitats. Are neighborhood parks considered urban habitat? Technically, yes they are urban, they... Continue Reading →
In my recent contribution to the special issue on urban evolution in Proceedings B, my co-authors and I share our findings on contrasting patterns of gene flow (paper here). This is one of several posts on the recent special issue on urban evolution in Proceedings B. Urbanization in the Western United States is significantly rapid... Continue Reading →
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