TY - JOUR
T1 - The Complexity of Urban Eco-evolutionary Dynamics
AU - Alberti, Marina
AU - Palkovacs, Eric P.
AU - Roches, Simone Des
AU - De Meester, Luc
AU - Brans, Kristien I.
AU - Govaert, Lynn
AU - Grimm, Nancy B.
AU - Harris, Nyeema C.
AU - Hendry, Andrew P.
AU - Schell, Christopher J.
AU - Szulkin, Marta
AU - Munshi-South, Jason
AU - Urban, Mark C.
AU - Verrelli, Brian C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This overview article has benefited from collaborations of the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (RCN): Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics in an Urban Planet: Underlying Mechanisms and Ecosystem Feedbacks (grant no. DEB 1840663) and from discussions among and input from the participants of the first RCN Workshop (Seattle 2019). We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that improved the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/9/18
Y1 - 2020/9/18
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - adaptation
KW - coupled human-natural systems
KW - eco-evolutionary dynamics
KW - metacommunities
KW - urban ecology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089695343&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85089695343&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/biosci/biaa079
DO - 10.1093/biosci/biaa079
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85089695343
SN - 0006-3568
VL - 70
SP - 772
EP - 793
JO - BioScience
JF - BioScience
IS - 9
ER -