Abstract
Urban evolutionary biology is the study of evolutionary change in organisms as a response to human built environments and all that high densities of humans entail. Put succinctly, urban evolution is the study of how features of cities drive allele, genotype, and phenotype frequency changes in populations across generations. This chapter introduces Urban Evolutionary Biology. It also emphasizes that urban evolutionary biology can—and should—have a societal impact, and a role in strengthening the drive towards more sustainable cities. An overview of chapters reporting core evidence of up-to-date urban evolutionary biology research follows. Finally, the chapter presents a brief discussion of challenges faced by the field, and outlines some inspiring future directions awaiting this nascent field of research.