The Evolutionary Ecology of Mutualisms in Urban Landscapes

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-129
Author(s):  
Rebecca E. Irwin ◽  
Elsa Youngsteadt ◽  
Paige S. Warren ◽  
Judith L. Bronstein

Mutualisms are critically important in maintaining the biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems. Mutualisms include a diverse array of interactions that result in reciprocal positive effects for both partners, including plant–pollinator, plant–seed disperser, and plant–rhizobia interactions. There is growing recognition that global environmental change can affect the ecological outcomes of mutualisms, but less attention has been paid to how urbanization in particular affects their evolution. This chapter builds from an ecological perspective and considers how urban landscapes may affect the evolutionary ecology of mutualism. It reviews the adaptive evolutionary processes that could affect mutualism in urban landscapes. It then surveys transportation, protection, and nutritional mutualisms to assess how urbanization may affect these mutualistic interactions in an evolutionary framework. The survey described in the chapter highlights a dearth of empirical and theoretical investigations on urban mutualisms from an evolutionary perspective despite potentially strong changes in selection pressures in urban areas. The chapter ends by outlining research directions to further the study of the evolutionary ecology of mutualisms in urban landscapes.

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 369 (6510) ◽  
pp. eaay4497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Schell ◽  
Karen Dyson ◽  
Tracy L. Fuentes ◽  
Simone Des Roches ◽  
Nyeema C. Harris ◽  
...  

Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth. In this analysis, we explicitly integrate ecology, evolution, and social processes to emphasize the relationships that bind social inequities—specifically racism—and biological change in urbanized landscapes. We draw on existing research to link racist practices, including residential segregation, to the heterogeneous patterns of flora and fauna observed by urban ecologists. In the future, urban ecology and evolution researchers must consider how systems of racial oppression affect the environmental factors that drive biological change in cities. Conceptual integration of the social and ecological sciences has amassed considerable scholarship in urban ecology over the past few decades, providing a solid foundation for incorporating environmental justice scholarship into urban ecological and evolutionary research. Such an undertaking is necessary to deconstruct urbanization’s biophysical patterns and processes, inform equitable and anti-racist initiatives promoting justice in urban conservation, and strengthen community resilience to global environmental change.


Author(s):  
Richard Dawson

Urban areas are expected to continue their rapid growth in the twenty-first century. Globally, cities are major sources of greenhouse gases emissions and their high population densities make them potential focal points of vulnerability to global environmental change. Moreover, their reach, in terms of flows of materials and resources, extends far outside their borders. Evidently, it is no longer tenable to consider urban systems to be static artefacts constructed in a stable environment, nor continue to divorce them from the global context that influences many of the climatic and socio-economic changes within cities. Furthermore, the uncertainty in the future climatic and socio-economic conditions poses significant challenges for planners. A framework is proposed for analysing urban systems with evidence-based tools over extended time scales. This forms the basis of a manifesto for future challenges and research directions for this critical subject area, which ultimately will help engineers and urban planners to better understand the areas for which they are responsible and to develop adaptation strategies that can tackle the challenges posed by long-term global change and lead to more sustainable cities.


jpa ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Rawlins

Author(s):  
Machiel Lamers ◽  
Jeroen Nawijn ◽  
Eke Eijgelaar

Over the last decades a substantial and growing societal and academic interest has emerged for the development of sustainable tourism. Scholars have highlighted the contribution of tourism to global environmental change and to local, detrimental social and environmental effects as well as to ways in which tourism contributes to nature conservation. Nevertheless the role of tourist consumers in driving sustainable tourism has remained unconvincing and inconsistent. This chapter reviews the constraints and opportunities of political consumerism for sustainable tourism. The discussion covers stronger pockets and a key weak pocket of political consumerism for sustainable tourism and also highlights inconsistencies in sustainable tourism consumption by drawing on a range of social theory arguments and possible solutions. The chapter concludes with an agenda for future research on this topic.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
A.F. Jităreanu ◽  
Elena Leonte ◽  
A. Chiran ◽  
Benedicta Drobotă

Abstract Advertising helps to establish a set of assumptions that the consumer will bring to all other aspects of their engagement with a given brand. Advertising provides tangible evidence of the financial credibility and competitive presence of an organization. Persuasion is becoming more important in advertising. In marketing, persuasive advertising acts to establish wants/motivations and beliefs/attitudes by helping to formulate a conception of the brand as being one which people like those in the target audience would or should prefer. Considering the changes in lifestyle and eating habits of a significant part of the population in urban areas in Romania, the paper aims to analyse how brands manage to differentiate themselves from competitors, to reposition themselves on the market and influence consumers, meeting their increasingly varied needs. Food brands on the Romanian market are trying, lately, to identify new methods of differentiation and new benefits for their buyers. Given that more and more consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about what they eat and the products’ health effects, brands struggle to highlight the fact that their products offer real benefits for the body. The advertisements have become more diversified and underline the positive effects, from the health and well - being point of view, that those foods offer (no additives and preservatives, use of natural ingredients, various vitamins and minerals or the fact that they are dietary). Advertising messages’ diversification is obvious on the Romanian market, in the context of an increasing concern of the population for the growing level of information of some major consumer segments.


Toxicon X ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 100069
Author(s):  
Gerardo Martín ◽  
Carlos Yáñez-Arenas ◽  
Rodrigo Rangel-Camacho ◽  
Kris A. Murray ◽  
Eyal Goldstein ◽  
...  

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