Bird life in the Anthropocene: understanding convergent adaptation to urbanisation

城市化是21世纪生物多样性的主要威胁。超过40亿人居住在城市空间，到2050年，这一数字预计将进一步增加24亿。这将对大量的分类群产生深远的影响，改变范围、生境、行为和表型。尽管城市化对生物多样性有负面影响，但它似乎推动了多种类群的适应。城市化有可能深刻改变非人类物种的适应环境；例如，它可能改变平均温度，引入新的食物来源，增加对病原体的暴露，并改变捕食者-猎物密度。然而，一些物种在城市环境中生存甚至茁壮成长；最有趣的是，这种情况在不同的时间尺度上反复发生，独立发生。对多个物种适应城市环境的趋同性质进行比较分析，具有令人兴奋的潜力，可以提供重要的洞察，了解生物多样性如何响应人为变化。鸟类是比较研究适应的理想模型，因为在生态、形态、行为和遗传方面有许多城乡差异的例子。公开可用的资源(即eBird、AVONET、Bird10K基因组)也可用于数百个物种的大规模分析。该项目旨在确定多种鸟类在生态、形态和遗传方面对城市环境的适应趋同。它将利用立即可用的资源和新的数据集来评估哪些特征、基因和环境的组合促进了城市适应。

Urbanisation is a major threat to biodiversity in the 21st Century. Over 4 billion people inhabit urban spaces and by 2050, this is predicted to increase by a further 2.4 billion. This will have a profound impact on a huge number of taxa, altering ranges, habitats, behaviours and phenotypes. Despite its negative impacts on biodiversity, urbanisation appears to have driven adaptation in multiple taxa. Urbanisation has the potential to profoundly alter the adaptive landscape for non-human species; e.g., it might change average temperatures, introduce new food sources, increase exposure to pathogens and alter predator-prey densities. Yet, some species survive and even thrive in urban environments; most intriguingly, this has occurred repeatedly, independently and across different timescales.A comparative analysis on the convergent nature of adaptation to urban environments across multiple species has exciting potential to provide important insight into how biodiversity responds to anthropogenic change. Birds are an ideal model for a comparative study of adaptation because of multiple examples of urban-rural divergence in ecology, morphology, behaviour and genetics. Publicly available resources (i.e., eBird, AVONET, Bird10K genomes) can also be used for large-scale analyses across many hundreds of species. This project aims to identify convergence in ecological, morphological and genetic adaptation to urban environments across multiple bird species. It will make use of immediately available resources and new datasets to assess what combination of traits, genes and environment promote urban adaptation.