Biodiversity adventures in wild Los Angeles: A comparative landscape genomic study of multiple species persistence across the urban-wildland interfaces

• Applicant: Dr. Joscha Beninde
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Evolution, Anthropology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415980344

Urbanization is tantamount to a near-permanent elimination of the locally dominant natural ecosystem. In the light of predictions of soaring global urbanization, maintaining and enhancing biodiversity in cities requires that we understand not just the distribution of species, but mechanistically how urbanization impacts the evolutionary potential of species now and in the future. Species persistence depends on the ability of breeding individuals to move between habitat patches. The resulting gene flow allows local adaptations to spread, it ameliorates the effects of inbreeding depression in small populations, and it maintains healthy metapopulation dynamics. The research proposed here is designed to identify key drivers directly impacting the distribution of species across a megacity, providing an unparalleled opportunity to improve our understanding of fundamental urban evolutionary ecology and principles of conservation. I organize my research around four key questions in urban evolutionary ecology, which will be answered by making use of the many urban-wildland interfaces unique to the Greater Los Angeles urban region. By compiling an unprecedented genomic dataset for seven species pairs, each composed of a broadly and a more narrowly ranging urban resident species, I will quantify the ways in which patterns in gene flow allow differentiating urban generalist and urban specialist species. The technological breakthrough allowing me to ask these questions is using thousands of genetic markers, or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), collected from hundreds of individuals per species. The resulting data resolution is extremely fine-scaled, enabling the identification of drivers of gene flow at previously unattainable resolution. Thus far, only a handful of studies have compared more than two species within the same landscape and none have focused on urban areas or has made use of large, genome-level SNP data for genomic inferences. I will also make use of the latest advances in statistical techniques, applying a novel landscape genomic optimization procedure that has never been applied in an urban context. Including plant, invertebrate and vertebrate animal species, this proposal builds on latest research developments, emphasizing the role that evolution plays in the maintenance of urban ecological processes. With a growing human population living in cities and the need for local climate change mitigation, urban biodiversity will play an increasingly important role in healthy urban ecosystem services, including its well-documented impact on human well-being. By replicating genomic methodology for multiple species within the same city, this research will deliver a critical, and completely missing prerequisite for a full understanding of the mechanisms by which urban landscapes enhance or reduce gene flow and therefore promote or inhibit urban biodiversity.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dr. H. Bradley Shaffer