URBAN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Urban Evolutionary Biology fills an important knowledge gap on wild organismal evolution in the urban environment whilst offering a novel exploration of the fast growing new field of evolutionary research The growing rate of urbanization and the maturation of urban study systems worldwide means interest in the urban environment as an agent of evolutionary change is rapidly increasing We are presently witnessing the emergence of a new field of research in evolutionary biology Despite its rapid global expansion the urban environment has until now been a largely neglected study site among evolutionary biologists With its conspicuously altered ecological dynamics it stands in stark contrast to the natural environments traditionally used as cornerstones for evolutionary ecology research Urbanization can offer a great range of new opportunities to test for rapid evolutionary processes as a consequence of human activity both because of replicate contexts for hypothesis testing but also because cities are characterized by an array of easily quantifiable environmental axes of variation and thus testable agents of selection Thanks to a wide possible breadth of inference in terms of taxa that may be studied and a great variety of analytical methods urban evolution h