Urban ecological systems are characterized by complex interactions among social, economic, institutional, and environmental variables. These interactions generate complex human-dominated landscapes, ...which significantly influence the functioning of local and global earth ecosystems and the services they provide to humans and other life on earth. Urban development fragments, isolates, and degrades natural habitats; simplifies and homogenizes species composition; disrupts hydrological systems; and modifies energy flow and nutrient cycling. Urban areas also appropriate a large share of earth’s carrying capacity from other regions in terms of resource input and waste sinks. Change in ecological conditions that result from human actions in urban areas ultimately affect human health and well-being. In this article, the author reviews the empirical evidence on the effects that patterns of urban development have on ecosystem function. Urban development affects the spatial heterogeneity of the landscape (i.e., pattern of variation in land cover) and spread of disturbance (i.e., invasive species). The author proposes that alternative urban patterns generate differential ecological effects. The review reveals that the interactions between urban development patterns and ecosystem dynamics are still poorly understood. The author draws on an empirical study of the Puget Sound metropolitan region currently developed at the University of Washington to propose directions for future empirical research that can inform strategies to minimize urban impacts on ecosystems.
•Humans mediate eco-evolutionary feedbacks through urbanization.•In this review, I discuss studies of observed signatures of urban-driven trait changes across multiple taxa.•By linking urban ...signatures to ecosystem function, we can hypothesize the eco-evolutionary implications of urbanization.•The hybrid nature of urban ecosystems is a source of both instability and innovation in the eco-evolutionary dynamic.•Understanding the mechanisms by which humans affect eco-evolutionary feedbacks in urban areas will provide new insights for maintaining ecosystem function in an urbanizing planet.
A great challenge for ecology in the coming decades is to understand the role humans play in eco-evolutionary dynamics. If, as emerging evidence shows, rapid evolutionary change affects ecosystem functioning and stability, current rapid environmental change and its evolutionary effects might have significant implications for ecological and human wellbeing on a relatively short time scale. Humans are major selective agents with potential for unprecedented evolutionary consequences for Earth's ecosystems, especially as cities expand rapidly. In this review, I identify emerging hypotheses on how urbanization drives eco-evolutionary dynamics. Studying how human-driven micro-evolutionary changes interact with ecological processes offers us the chance to advance our understanding of eco-evolutionary feedbacks and will provide new insights for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function over the long term.
As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of ...thinking about coupled human and natural systems.
On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments.
Cities That Think like Planetsadvances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.
Humans challenge the phenotypic, genetic, and cultural makeup of species by affecting the fitness landscapes on which they evolve. Recent studies show that cities might play a major role in ...contemporary evolution by accelerating phenotypic changes in wildlife, including animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms. Many studies of ecoevolutionary change have focused on anthropogenic drivers, but none of these studies has specifically examined the role that urbanization plays in ecoevolution or explicitly examined its mechanisms. This paper presents evidence on the mechanisms linking urban development patterns to rapid evolutionary changes for species that play important functional roles in communities and ecosystems. Through a metaanalysis of experimental and observational studies reporting more than 1,600 phenotypic changes in species across multiple regions, we ask whether we can discriminate an urban signature of phenotypic change beyond the established natural baselines and other anthropogenic signals. We then assess the relative impact of five types of urban disturbances including habitat modifications, biotic interactions, habitat heterogeneity, novel disturbances, and social interactions. Our study shows a clear urban signal; rates of phenotypic change are greater in urbanizing systems compared with natural and nonurban anthropogenic systems. By explicitly linking urban development to traits that affect ecosystem function, we can map potential ecoevolutionary implications of emerging patterns of urban agglomerations and uncover insights for maintaining key ecosystem functions upon which the sustainability of human well-being depends.
Urban ecology is a field encompassing multiple disciplines and practical applications and has grown rapidly. However, the field is heterogeneous as a global inquiry with multiple theoretical and ...conceptual frameworks, variable research approaches, and a lack of coordination among multiple schools of thought and research foci. Here, we present an international consensus on how urban ecology can advance along multiple research directions. There is potential for the field to mature as a holistic, integrated science of urban systems. Such an integrated science could better inform decisionmakers who need increased understanding of complex relationships among social, ecological, economic, and built infrastructure systems. To advance the field requires conceptual synthesis, knowledge and data sharing, cross-city comparative research, new intellectual networks, and engagement with additional disciplines. We consider challenges and opportunities for understanding dynamics of urban systems. We suggest pathways for advancing urban ecology research to support the goals of improving urban sustainability and resilience, conserving urban biodiversity, and promoting human well-being on an urbanizing planet.
Urbanization is changing Earth’s ecosystems by altering the interactions and feedbacks between the fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes that maintain life. Humans in cities alter the ...eco-evolutionary play by simultaneously changing both the actors and the stage on which the eco-evolutionary play takes place. Urbanization modifies land surfaces, microclimates, habitat connectivity, ecological networks, food webs, species diversity, and species composition. These environmental changes can lead to changes in phenotypic, genetic, and cultural makeup of wild populations that have important consequences for ecosystem function and the essential services that nature provides to human society, such as nutrient cycling, pollination, seed dispersal, food production, and water and air purification. Understanding and monitoring urbanization-induced evolutionary changes is important to inform strategies to achieve sustainability. In the present article, we propose that understanding these dynamics requires rigorous characterization of urbanizing regions as rapidly evolving, tightly coupled human–natural systems. We explore how the emergent properties of urbanization affect eco-evolutionary dynamics across space and time. We identify five key urban drivers of change—habitat modification, connectivity, heterogeneity, novel disturbances, and biotic interactions—and highlight the direct consequences of urbanization-driven eco-evolutionary change for nature’s contributions to people. Then, we explore five emerging complexities—landscape complexity, urban discontinuities, socio-ecological heterogeneity, cross-scale interactions, legacies and time lags—that need to be tackled in future research. We propose that the evolving metacommunity concept provides a powerful framework to study urban eco-evolutionary dynamics.
Many of the world’s major cities have implemented tree planting programs based on assumed environmental and social benefits of urban forests. Recent studies have increasingly tested these assumptions ...and provide empirical evidence for the contributions of tree planting programs, as well as their feasibility and limits, for solving or mitigating urban environmental and social issues. We propose that current evidence supports local cooling, stormwater absorption, and health benefits of urban trees for local residents. However, the potential for urban trees to appreciably mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution over a wide array of sites and environmental conditions is limited. Consequently, urban trees appear to be more promising for climate and pollution
adaptation
strategies than mitigation strategies. In large part, this is due to space constraints limiting the extent of urban tree canopies relative to the current magnitude of emissions. The most promising environmental and health impacts of urban trees are those that can be realized with well-stewarded tree planting and localized design interventions at site to municipal scales. Tree planting at these scales has documented benefits on local climate and health, which can be maximized through targeted site design followed by monitoring, adaptive management, and studies of long-term eco-evolutionary dynamics.
Socio‐eco‐evolutionary dynamics in cities Des Roches, Simone; Brans, Kristien I.; Lambert, Max R. ...
Evolutionary Applications,
January 2021, Volume:
14, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Cities are uniquely complex systems regulated by interactions and feedbacks between nature and human society. Characteristics of human society—including culture, economics, technology and ...politics—underlie social patterns and activity, creating a heterogeneous environment that can influence and be influenced by both ecological and evolutionary processes. Increasing research on urban ecology and evolutionary biology has coincided with growing interest in eco‐evolutionary dynamics, which encompasses the interactions and reciprocal feedbacks between evolution and ecology. Research on both urban evolutionary biology and eco‐evolutionary dynamics frequently focuses on contemporary evolution of species that have potentially substantial ecological—and even social—significance. Still, little work fully integrates urban evolutionary biology and eco‐evolutionary dynamics, and rarely do researchers in either of these fields fully consider the role of human social patterns and processes. Because cities are fundamentally regulated by human activities, are inherently interconnected and are frequently undergoing social and economic transformation, they represent an opportunity for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to study urban “socio‐eco‐evolutionary dynamics.” Through this new framework, we encourage researchers of urban ecology and evolution to fully integrate human social drivers and feedbacks to increase understanding and conservation of ecosystems, their functions and their contributions to people within and outside cities.
A roadmap for urban evolutionary ecology Rivkin, L. Ruth; Santangelo, James S.; Alberti, Marina ...
Evolutionary Applications,
March 2019, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Urban ecosystems are rapidly expanding throughout the world, but how urban growth affects the evolutionary ecology of species living in urban areas remains largely unknown. Urban ecology has advanced ...our understanding of how the development of cities and towns change environmental conditions and alter ecological processes and patterns. However, despite decades of research in urban ecology, the extent to which urbanization influences evolutionary and eco‐evolutionary change has received little attention. The nascent field of urban evolutionary ecology seeks to understand how urbanization affects the evolution of populations, and how those evolutionary changes in turn influence the ecological dynamics of populations, communities, and ecosystems. Following a brief history of this emerging field, this Perspective article provides a research agenda and roadmap for future research aimed at advancing our understanding of the interplay between ecology and evolution of urban‐dwelling organisms. We identify six key questions that, if addressed, would significantly increase our understanding of how urbanization influences evolutionary processes. These questions consider how urbanization affects nonadaptive evolution, natural selection, and convergent evolution, in addition to the role of urban environmental heterogeneity on species evolution, and the roles of phenotypic plasticity versus adaptation on species’ abundance in cities. Our final question examines the impact of urbanization on evolutionary diversification. For each of these six questions, we suggest avenues for future research that will help advance the field of urban evolutionary ecology. Lastly, we highlight the importance of integrating urban evolutionary ecology into urban planning, conservation practice, pest management, and public engagement.
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