The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 369 (6510) ◽  
pp. eaay4497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Schell ◽  
Karen Dyson ◽  
Tracy L. Fuentes ◽  
Simone Des Roches ◽  
Nyeema C. Harris ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Ecology ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Emergent Structure ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
Social Components ◽  
Evolutionary Consequences

Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth. In this analysis, we explicitly integrate ecology, evolution, and social processes to emphasize the relationships that bind social inequities—specifically racism—and biological change in urbanized landscapes. We draw on existing research to link racist practices, including residential segregation, to the heterogeneous patterns of flora and fauna observed by urban ecologists. In the future, urban ecology and evolution researchers must consider how systems of racial oppression affect the environmental factors that drive biological change in cities. Conceptual integration of the social and ecological sciences has amassed considerable scholarship in urban ecology over the past few decades, providing a solid foundation for incorporating environmental justice scholarship into urban ecological and evolutionary research. Such an undertaking is necessary to deconstruct urbanization’s biophysical patterns and processes, inform equitable and anti-racist initiatives promoting justice in urban conservation, and strengthen community resilience to global environmental change.

scholarly journals Morphological Stability of Rural Populations Confirms Their Use As Controls in Urban Ecology Studies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Regacho ◽  
Javier delBarco-Trillo
Keyword(s):  
Urban Ecology ◽  
Mus Musculus ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Rodent Species ◽  
Rural Populations ◽  
Developmental Stress ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Morphological Asymmetry

Abstract The expansion of urban environments and how animals may be affected by them are being increasingly investigated, leading to a surge in urban ecology studies. Many urban ecology studies involve a direct comparison between rural and urban populations, or the use of urban gradients along a continuum from rural to urban areas. The implicit, although not properly investigated, assumption in these rural vs urban comparisons is that the rural populations offer a control that represents a lack of the anthropogenic stressors affecting the urban populations. Here we used museum skulls from 14 rodent species to conduct two separate studies, measuring fluctuating asymmetry (FA) as a proxy of developmental stress to assess the effect of anthropogenic disturbance. First, we compared urban and rural specimens of house mice (Mus musculus) to validate our methodological approach. Second, we compared rural specimens from 14 rodent species collected during the last two centuries across Austria. We hypothesised that FA in rural populations has not increased over the last two centuries, which would support the use of rural populations as a proper control in rural vs urban comparisons. We found higher morphological asymmetry in urban populations of Mus musculus compared to rural populations, which is consistent with similar studies in other species. However, we did not find any significant increase in FA over time in rural populations for any of the studied species. This supports the common practice of using rural populations as a control in rural vs urban comparisons when assessing the effects of urbanisation.

The Evolutionary Ecology of Mutualisms in Urban Landscapes

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-129
Author(s):  
Rebecca E. Irwin ◽  
Elsa Youngsteadt ◽  
Paige S. Warren ◽  
Judith L. Bronstein
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Plant Seed ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
Plant Pollinator

Mutualisms are critically important in maintaining the biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems. Mutualisms include a diverse array of interactions that result in reciprocal positive effects for both partners, including plant–pollinator, plant–seed disperser, and plant–rhizobia interactions. There is growing recognition that global environmental change can affect the ecological outcomes of mutualisms, but less attention has been paid to how urbanization in particular affects their evolution. This chapter builds from an ecological perspective and considers how urban landscapes may affect the evolutionary ecology of mutualism. It reviews the adaptive evolutionary processes that could affect mutualism in urban landscapes. It then surveys transportation, protection, and nutritional mutualisms to assess how urbanization may affect these mutualistic interactions in an evolutionary framework. The survey described in the chapter highlights a dearth of empirical and theoretical investigations on urban mutualisms from an evolutionary perspective despite potentially strong changes in selection pressures in urban areas. The chapter ends by outlining research directions to further the study of the evolutionary ecology of mutualisms in urban landscapes.

Towards the Development of Quality of Life Indicators in the ‘Digital’ City

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Craglia ◽  
Lila Leontidou ◽  
Giampaolo Nuvolati ◽  
Jürgen Schweikart
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Policy Implementation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Digital City ◽  
Quality Of Life Indicators

Cities are central to the economic and social development of European society, not only because over 80% of European citizens live in urban areas, but also because cities are at the same time centres of production, innovation, employment, and culture, and loci of segregation, deprivation, and ethnic conflict. The emergence of a European-wide urban policy, has given new impetus to the need for comparable indicators of the quality of life to monitor development and policy implementation. This paper reviews the literature on quality of life indicators, and argues that traditional measures of the quality of life need to be supplemented with two new dimensions that reflect more recent postmodernist thinking about the composition of urban landscapes, and the contribution to the quality of life of the emerging information society. We argue that the challenges of building appropriate indicators reflecting these new dimensions are considerable, even in urban environments so rich in information systems and data sources, if they are to qualify as ‘digital cities’. There are difficulties in finding common workable definitions of the indicators themselves, as well as definitions of the relevant populations, including city residents, and users. By raising these issues and suggesting possible avenues for addressing these challenges we contribute to a much-needed debate on how to define such indicators, which is the prerequisite for their development and use.

scholarly journals Designing Towards Ecological Environments: A Modular Approach to Structure a Design Studio Sequence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oswald Jenewein ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Design Studio ◽  
Western World ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

Architecture is a process that forms the physical background of every-day life. Both in academia and practice, a contemporary design studio must tackle ecological topics as architecture materializes itself within the rapidly changing natural environment. The premise for this paper are three timely challenges that the world is facing collectively in this stage of Post-Industrialization.First and foremost, the challenges arising from the Epoch of the Anthropocene. As the repercussions of climate change have started to materialize, the built environment needs to adapt to changing conditions, from sea-level-rise to extreme weather and cultural shifts, as climate migrants need to find new lands.Second, the challenges correlated with globalized economies and networks which have been a major force causing environmental threats and change. Capitalist democracies in the western world have developed complex logistical processes shipping commodities, goods, and thoughts around the world. These processes have shaped the (built) environment and life especially in urban areas. The relationship between the individual and the collective undergoes change as a consequence of how (political) regimes organize their economies and distribute wealth.Third, the challenges and opportunities digitalization offers to society. The dematerialization of (urban) landscapes through digital media enables the (re)distribution and access to information, education, and labor. Urban environments need to address these challenges as opportunities to create fairer and healthier places to live.These three challenges form the context of the studio modules presented here and link the contemporary discourse of architecture to a global cross-disciplinary discourse.

Habitat use by grey-crowned babbler, Pomatostomus temporalis, in urban and peri-urban environments

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Kathryn Teare Ada Lambert ◽  
Hugh Ford
Keyword(s):  
Habitat Use ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Native Species ◽  
Woody Debris ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Ground Cover ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Habitat Requirements ◽  
Urban Landscapes

Habitat loss in the urban environment leads to a high rate of local extinction of native fauna. In contrast, where key habitat structures, such as woody debris, shrubs and trees, are maintained, urban landscapes can retain many native species. To manage urban habitats successfully for urban bird communities, it is, therefore, necessary to understand the habitat requirements of the species using them. We have previously shown that the grey-crowned babbler, Pomatostomus temporalis, exhibits similar mean weight, sex ratio and group size in natural and altered habitat in and around Dubbo, New South Wales. In the present study, we detail the movements and habitat use of the groups that inhabit urban areas. We found that groups behaved similarly in urban and peri-urban areas, but showed small differences in the frequency of behaviours, based on the habitat feature that was available. The results suggested that, despite the decline of the grey-crowned babbler in the southern parts of its range, this species is able to survive in altered habitats, if nesting habitat and ground cover remain available and neighbouring groups persist nearby. Because other woodland bird species have shown similar responses to urban environments, managers of urban parkland should provide foraging substrates for a variety of woodland bird species, including vulnerable species, to ameliorate threatening processes and protect key habitat requirements.

scholarly journals Nature-Based Deployment Strategies for Multiple Paces of Change: The Case of Oimachi, Japan

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Roggema ◽  
Nico Tillie ◽  
Greg Keeffe ◽  
Wanglin Yan
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Response Analysis ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Landscape Characteristics ◽  
Deployment Strategy ◽  
Planning Approach ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Right

In this article a planning approach is proposed to accommodate different paces of urbanisation. Instead of responding to a single problem with a Pavlov-type of response, analysis shows that the transformational tempi of different urban landscapes require multiple deployment strategies to develop urban environments that are sustainable and resilient. The application of nature-based solutions, enhancing both human and natural health in cities, is used as the foundation for the design of deployment strategies that respond to different paces of urban change. The results show that urban characteristics, such as population density and built space is, partly, dependent on the underlying landscape characteristics, therefore show specific development pathways. To create liveable and sustainable urban areas that can deal holistically with a range of intertwined problems, specific deployment strategies should be used in each specific urban context. This benefits the city-precinct as a whole and at the local scale. Even small nature-based solutions, applied as the right deployment strategy in the right context, have profound impact as the starting point of a far-reaching urban transformation. The case-study for Oimachi in Japan illustrates how this planning approach can be applied, how the different urban rhythms are identified, and to which results this leads.

Cognition and Adaptation to Urban Environments

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-267
Author(s):  
Daniel Sol ◽  
Oriol Lapiedra ◽  
Simon Ducatez
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Heritable Variation ◽  
Natural Habitats ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Population Extinction ◽  
Generation Times ◽  
Evolutionary Consequences

Urbanization is one of the most drastic alterations of natural habitats, causing sudden adaptive mismatches that make population persistence difficult for many organisms. Urban contexts may be challenging for adaptation, particularly for animals with long generation times with slow evolutionary responses. This chapter argues that cognition may play a major role in facilitating evolutionary adaptation of animals to the urban environment. By regulating how animals gather, preserve, and use information, cognition can influence adaptive evolution in urban areas by (1) allowing individuals to choose the habitats and resources that better match their phenotypes, and (2) helping animals to construct learned responses to challenges they have never or rarely experienced before. These cognitive processes can weaken the strength of selection. However, they can also facilitate adaptive evolution by reducing the risk of population extinction and by ensuring that individuals are more gradually exposed to the new conditions. In addition, cognitive processes can maintain genetic diversity for selection to act upon in the future as well as promoting local adaptation by reducing gene flow with nearby non-urban populations. Finally, learned behaviours can allow the population to move close to the realm of attraction of new adaptive peaks, driving evolution toward novel directions. Cognition itself may also evolve in urban areas—particularly in long-lived generalists—if it exhibits enough heritable variation. Echoing recent suggestions in cognitive ecology, the chapter highlights the need to design and carry out experiments explicitly designed to assess the evolutionary consequences of cognition in urban populations.

Diversity of organisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip James
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Native Species ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
The Common ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Micro Organisms ◽  
Diversity Of Life

The focus of this chapter is an examination of the diversity of living organisms found within urban environments, both inside and outside buildings. The discussion commences with prions and viruses before moving on to consider micro-organisms, plants, and animals. Prions and viruses cause disease in plants and animals, including humans. Micro-organisms are ubiquitous and are found in great numbers throughout urban environments. New technologies are providing new insights into their diversity. Plants may be found inside buildings as well as in gardens and other green spaces. The final sections of the chapter offer a discussion of the diversity of animals that live in urban areas for part or all of their life cycle. Examples of the diversity of life in urban environments are presented throughout, including native and non-native species, those that are benign and deadly, and the common and the rare.

scholarly journals High-Resolution Modelling of Thermal Exposure during a Hot Spell: A Case Study Using PALM-4U in Prague, Czech Republic

Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Jan Geletič ◽  
Michal Lehnert ◽  
Pavel Krč ◽  
Jaroslav Resler ◽  
Eric Scott Krayenhoff
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Heat Exposure ◽  
Thermal Exposure ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Cooling Effect ◽  
Spatiotemporal Variability ◽  
Climate Index ◽  
Street Canyons ◽  
General Terms

The modelling of thermal exposure in outdoor urban environments is a highly topical challenge in modern climate research. This paper presents the results derived from a new micrometeorological model that employs an integrated biometeorology module to model Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI). This is PALM-4U, which includes an integrated human body-shape parameterization, deployed herein for a pilot domain in Prague, Czech Republic. The results highlight the key role of radiation in the spatiotemporal variability of thermal exposure in moderate-climate urban areas during summer days in terms of the way in which this directly affects thermal comfort through radiant temperature and indirectly through the complexity of turbulence in street canyons. The model simulations suggest that the highest thermal exposure may be expected within street canyons near the irradiated north sides of east–west streets and near streets oriented north–south. Heat exposure in streets increases in proximity to buildings with reflective paints. The lowest heat exposure during the day may be anticipated in tree-shaded courtyards. The cooling effect of trees may range from 4 °C to 9 °C in UTCI, and the cooling effect of grass in comparison with artificial paved surfaces in open public places may be from 2 °C to 5 °C UTCI. In general terms, this study illustrates that the PALM modelling system provides a new perspective on the spatiotemporal differentiation of thermal exposure at the pedestrian level; it may therefore contribute to more climate-sensitive urban planning.

scholarly journals High Diversity in Urban Areas: How Comprehensive Sampling Reveals High Ant Species Richness within One of the Most Urbanized Regions of the World

Diversity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 358
Author(s):  
François Brassard ◽  
Chi-Man Leong ◽  
Hoi-Hou Chan ◽  
Benoit Guénard
Keyword(s):  
Exotic Species ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
Ant Communities ◽  
Continuous Increase ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
The World ◽  
Ant Diversity ◽  
The Vertical Distribution

The continuous increase in urbanization has been perceived as a major threat for biodiversity, particularly within tropical regions. Urban areas, however, may still provide opportunities for conservation. In this study focused on Macao (China), one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, we used a comprehensive approach, targeting all the vertical strata inhabited by ants, to document the diversity of both native and exotic species, and to produce an updated checklist. We then compared these results with 112 studies on urban ants to illustrate the dual roles of cities in sustaining ant diversity and supporting the spread of exotic species. Our study provides the first assessment on the vertical distribution of urban ant communities, allowing the detection of 55 new records in Macao, for a total of 155 ant species (11.5% being exotic); one of the highest species counts reported for a city globally. Overall, our results contrast with the dominant paradigm that urban landscapes have limited conservation value but supports the hypothesis that cities act as gateways for exotic species. Ultimately, we argue for a more comprehensive understanding of ants within cities around the world to understand native and exotic patterns of diversity.

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