EVO-LTER: Multifaceted mechanisms of metropolis: Integrating society, ecology, evolution, and plasticity to advance urban evolutionary ecology

More than half of all people live in cities and the percentage in cities is increasing. Environmental changes accompany this urbanization. These changes include extreme urban heat, use of water for irrigation, and air pollution.

Such changes shape the animals and plants that live there, and this has consequences for human health and well-being. Because urbanization can alter where species live and how they act, it is important to determine the extent, causes, and consequences of urban change on animals and plants. Recent research suggests that urban species can undergo rapid evolution due to the rapid environmental changes that occur in urban areas.

Long-term datasets are required to assess such changes over time for different taxa and different environmental conditions. This work will assess the viability and impact of species in a changing urban environment over the long term. In the process it will examine how urban biodiversity directly affects our lives. The project will also help train the next generation of urban evolutionary ecologists.

This award supports the organization and execution of two workshops, bringing together diverse participants in urban ecology and evolutionary biology from the US and across the globe. It is targeted at capitalizing on the decades of urban ecological data compiled by the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) site and other sites in the LTER network along with the evolutionary-biology expertise of workshop participants to develop more comprehensive studies of the evolution of species within urban ecosystems.

These workshops will develop methods for utilizing long term data at the CAP LTER for evolutionary study, and then provide those methods to the larger community of ecologists and evolutionary biologists.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.