Bird life in the Anthropocene: understanding convergent adaptation to urbanisation

城市化是世纪生物多样性的主要威胁。超过40亿人居住在城市空间，预计到2050年将再增加24亿人。这将对大量的分类群产生深远的影响，改变范围，栖息地，行为和表型。尽管城市化对生物多样性产生了负面影响，但它似乎推动了多种生物的适应。城市化有可能深刻改变非人类物种的适应性景观;例如，它可能会改变平均温度，引入新的食物来源，增加病原体的暴露，并改变捕食者-猎物的密度。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，这是反复发生的，独立的，并跨越不同的时间尺度。比较分析多个物种对城市环境的适应趋同性，具有令人兴奋的潜力，为生物多样性如何响应人为变化提供重要的见解。鸟类是进行适应性比较研究的理想模式，因为有许多例子表明，城乡在生态、形态、行为和遗传方面存在差异。公开可用的资源（即，eBird、AVONET、Bird 10 K基因组）也可用于数百个物种的大规模分析。该项目旨在确定多个鸟类物种在生态、形态和遗传上对城市环境的适应。它将利用现有资源和新的数据集来评估性状、基因和环境的何种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.