GLUEing the World: The GLobal Urban Evolution Project and Its Importance to Urban Biodiversity Conservation

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in research projects aimed at understanding the ecology of cities. How and to what extent urbanization is responsible for species’ evolution is historically a much less understood topic, because urban evolutionary biology is a nascent science. Most of the empirical and theoretical investigation of this new branch of evolution has been published recently, that is within the last 15 years. Studies on urban evolutionary biology have relevant implications for the environmental design of cities and for conserving the evolutionary potential and ecological success of urban biota. There is a strong bias towards studies conducted in North America and Europe, and the literature lacks empirical studies that investigate how the greater biodiversity observed in the tropics responds evolutionarily to urbanization processes. Expanding urban evolutionary biology in tropical cities is a priority for urban evolutionary biologists. This perspective chapter explores how the Global Urban Evolution Project, the world’s largest scale study of urban evolutionary ecology, is contributing to understanding how urbanization is affecting the ecology and evolution of life, and how this knowledge can be applied to the conservation of the biological diversity of tropical cities.