Thousands of kilometres of creepy catacombs under the city of Odessa, Ukraine; derelict strips of brambles along railway lines in Amsterdam in the Netherlands; stacks of dead leaves piled around street-side trees in Baltimore, Maryland; vacant lots in inner-city Beijing; slimy greenish-grey films in a Parisian gutter; a lawn of astroturf in front of a Melbourne office building…
City dwellers pass places like these on a daily basis – and look away in disgust or indifference. When talking about urban nature, such unsightly spots aren’t what comes to mind – we think instead of pleasant city parks or grandiose urban rewilding projects. And yet, real ecosystems are everywhere in the city, from the gutters to the rooftops and right under our feet. They are uniquely urban, with a yet-uncharted natural history, begging to be studied by a new band of community scientists.
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Cities are where all manner of human environmental effects coalesce. Pollution from chemicals, plastic waste, noise and artificial light; roads and roadkill; the urban heat island; impervious surfaces made of concrete, glass, and brick; trade that brings in exotic species – all conspire to create urban landscapes that are, ecologically, completely different from natural habitats.
But all these novel urban environments are real biotopes in their own right, biologically as exciting as rainforests, mountaintops and oceanic islands, with unprecedented ecological communities biologists are only just starting to uncover.
Algae and microorganisms in street gutters are tolerant of heat and pollution. In the sewers and catacombs under cities live invertebrates akin to cave organisms. Forgotten, isolated patches of inner-city vegetation driven to extinction elsewhere. And artificial lawns turn out to be to sprout and live together.
There is also brand-new animal behaviour to be observed. In Japan, use traffic to crack walnuts on pedestrian crossings. In the Netherlands, lesser black-backed gulls on hot tin roofs. Sulfur-crested cockatoos in Sydney have figured out how to open garbage bins.
And there is real, rapid evolution, from city snails in which their bodies stay cooler – thus resisting the urban heat island – to lizards that with better grip on slippery human-made surfaces.
Even completely new species can be found in cities. In Salt Lake City, Utah, incessant gardening created a new biotope for a . And in the catacombs of Odessa, urban spelunkers discovered a .
The city is thus the next frontier for biological exploration. It is a completely new ecosystem, rapidly expanding all over the world, and created by the actions of a single species, Homo sapiens, a biological phenomenon unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. And city dwellers are watching it all happen.
The time is right: the open science revolution has made scientific literature, software and data accessible to all. Universities offer massive open online courses for anyone to obtain academic-level biology and ecology training. Community labs and nature clubs give their members access to kitchen-counter DNA kits and microscopes.
Everything is in place for community scientists to discover the new, unstudied biological phenomena all around them in the cities where they live. It may be a way out for all those urbanites who feel they have become disconnected from nature. By opening their eyes to the uncharted habitats in their own street, living in the city can become a delight again.
Menno Schilthuizen is the author of The Urban Naturalist: How to make the city your scientific playground
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