Sustainability Spotlight, Sep 2021 - City Clocks Group: Sustaining Urban Ecosystems
Cities are one of the few landscapes on Earth that are increasing in spatial extent. It is crucial to understand how we should build, manage and plan our cities in order to ensure that they will be able to sustain functional ecosystems where wild species can thrive and biodiversity can flourish.
Urban environments are also relatively novel evolutionarily-speaking, and most species are still adapting to city life. Cities are therefore unique opportunities to observe, measure and understand evolution in real time. The University's City Clocks Group seeks to uncover the strategies that animals adopt to cope with global environmental change. In particular, they study how rhythms of life on both a daily and seasonal scale are tuned to city life.
This multidisplinary research group, led by Dr Davide Dominoni, is based in the University's Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine. Their research spans genes to molecules, to behaviour and populations. They use tools and approaches as diverse as gene expression analysis, metabolomics, behavioural observations, biotelemetry, statistical analyses of biological rhythms and time-series, and mark-recapture modelling.
Image credits: All images supplied by and used with permission of the City Clocks Group.