Toward a Cross-Disciplinary Understanding of Urban Evolution

Synopsis Urbanization is reshaping the planet at an unprecedented rate, altering landscapes and environmental conditions in ways that impose novel and often intense selective pressures on wildlife. These urban ecosystems provide replicated, real-time “natural experiments” for studying evolution from behavioral, physiological, morphological, molecular, and computational perspectives. This special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology brings together research that spans these subdisciplines, showcasing how urban environments influence evolutionary processes in diverse taxa. The collected studies illustrate how urbanization drives phenotypic and genomic divergence, alters trait correlations, and reshapes interactions between organisms and their environments. Together, they highlight the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration in understanding the mechanisms and consequences of rapid urban evolution. Urban evolutionary biology remains a young but rapidly growing field. As the impacts of anthropogenic activities, pollution, and urban sprawl intensify, there is a critical need for integration across biological subfields to predict how organisms will respond. This volume calls for intentional collaboration, shared data frameworks, and continued synthesis across disciplines to unlock a deeper understanding of evolutionary dynamics in cities—and to leverage urbanization as a powerful lens for studying contemporary evolution.