Socioecosystems, part II

The following table, developed by Kowarik (2011), features the main urban drivers of plant and animal adaptations to city environments. The impacts of habitat fragmentation, pollutants, and disturbance in cities are well documented. But the emergence of research on novel habitats paint the possibilities of new urban ecosystems in the making. Life continues to adapt to the harshest of environmental conditions.

Socioecosystems (Grimm)

"There is an increasing body of evidence that urban land uses effect profound changes in all environmental components and that humans are the main drivers of change (Sukopp et al., 1979; Gilbert, 1989; Pickett et al., 2001; Alberti et al., 2003), thus leading to the idea of addressing cities as “socioecosystems” (Grimm et al., 2008)"

--Ingo Kowarik, "Novel urban ecosystems, biodiversity, and conservation", Environmental Pollution 159 (2011) 1974-1983

This interesting chart below by Kowarik (2011) identifies the urban drivers of biodiversity through landscape practices--including income levels of a neighborhood, available ornamental types, management, and propagule dispersal. How does your neighborhood fare?

Urban ecology and sustainability: The state-of-the-science and future directions

“Some components of cities or even some cities as a whole may be viewed as “novel ecosystems” in which the value of biodiversity should not be judged by its origins (Davis et al., 2011; Standish et al., 2013). Instead, we should “organize priorities around whether species are producing benefits or harm to biodiversity, human health, ecological services and economies” (Davis et al., 2011), and those alien (but not invasive) species that provide abundant ecosystem services should be incorporated into urban planning and management (Clark and Nicholas, 2013; Davis et al., 2011; Standish et al., 2013).” 

Wu, Jianguo. (2014). Urban ecology and sustainability: The state-of-the-science and future directions. Landscape and Urban Planning. 125. . 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.018. 

Urban Nature Show on WTTW

Check out Marcus Kronforst's online video show that addresses urban ecology topics in 3 cities--Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. It's available here: http://interactive.wttw.com/urbannature#!/

Marcus Kronforst, PhD, is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago. He is a prominent researcher in the field of evolutionary biology, where his work focuses on wing pattern mimicry in butterflies. Kronforst has published his scientific research in an array of highly influential journals, including Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences USA, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Genetics, and Genome Biology, among others. He has been named a Pew Biomedical Research Scholar and he is the recent recipient of both an NSF CAREER award and an NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity grant, along with a 2016 Distinguished Faculty Award from the University of Chicago. Kronforst earned his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. He received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Miami in 1998. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he held a five-year Bauer Fellowship at Harvard University’s FAS Center for Systems Biology. Kronforst joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012.