Evolution in an Urbanizing World
“How life adapts to cities around the world” is a 5 minute educational animated film created by Sherry An (myself), a science and medical illuHow the GLUE Animation Came Aboutstrator and designer from Mississauga, Canada. The film uses 3D animation and visual storytelling to share the goals and results of the first GLUE study in... Continue Reading →
In the first SEEP workshop urban evolutionary ecologists discussed collaborations with the network of Long Term Ecological Research Stations (LTER) to integrate human socio-cultural dynamics in studies of urban ecology and evolution. The field of urban evolution has only recently begun to incorporate the social dynamics of urban communities as an important covariate shaping ecology... Continue Reading →
Earlier this week, the wonderful women over at Women of Fisheries posted about the struggles of going to the bathroom when doing fieldwork on a boat. They point out that going to the bathroom can be especially uncomfortable for women since it's more difficult to easily pee off the side of the boat due to... Continue Reading →
Urban fieldwork is its own beast. Sure, compared to remote sites you might have regular access to bathrooms and food but there are different situations to be aware of or capitalize on when handling animals in the public eye.
Many urban wildlife biologists face unique challenges when trying to capture their study organisms. Traditional methods that are used in remote areas are often not available to urban wildlife biologists, either because the method requires traps that the public tampers with (though this problem does happen to non-urban biologists as well), because urban animals are... 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 →
This is part two of a two part series from Carly Ziter and Karen Dyson, adapted from a recent paper we wrote as a “how to” guide to urban fieldwork on private land. In last week's post Fieldwork on Urban Private Property: Getting Started, we talked about how to get started with fieldwork on urban private... Continue Reading →
Let’s consider a scenario. You’re designing a new research project, and you realize that for the first time that you (or your students) are going to need access to private property in an urban area to answer your question properly. Do you need a permit? A permission form? Who do you ask? Should you just... Continue Reading →
One way that animals may adapt to urban environments is by expanding their diet to include anthropogenic food, as discussed in the earlier post “Is Anthropogenic Food Waste Driving the Evolution of Urban Animals?”. But how can we tell if urban animals are actually consuming enough anthropogenic food to change physiology and drive evolution? We... 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 →
As life scientists that choose to study species within a city – habitats that are dominated by stochasticity, ecological traps, and, well, humans – we’re sort of like the crazy cousins at the biological sciences family reunion. Indeed, studying a system in which humans are both the drivers and beneficiaries of environmental change can throw... Continue Reading →
Posted by Ruth Rivkin (PhD candidate at University of Toronto Mississauga) We’ve all been there: You’re hard at work sampling on someone’s lawn, in a ditch next to the road, or in a public park, when suddenly you hear a voice shouting “Hey you, what the @#$% are you doing over there?!” So now you... Continue Reading →
Collecting samples in urban environments can present some challenges (as Matt Combs describes in "The Good, The Bad, and The Smelly" and Jane Remfert describes in “Urban Residential Field Tip”). As someone working on pigeons in Northeastern cities, I’ve encountered problems while simply trying to collect my samples. Many ornithologists use mist nets, but these... Continue Reading →
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