Mark C. Urban is a biologist and associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. His work focuses on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape natural communities across multiple spatial scales.
Urban was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California from 2006 to 2008. In 2008, Urban joined the faculty of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Connecticut as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 2019.
Work
Urban has contributed to biology by advocating for tighter linkages between ecology and evolutionary biology, suggesting the prevalence of fine-scaled microgeographic adaptation in nature, and highlighting the accelerating extinction risk from global warming.
As a contributor to the subfield of Eco-evolution, he is one of the founders of the evolving metacommunity framework,[1] which emphasizes the joint interaction between species-sorting and local adaptation across environmental patches linked by dispersal in determining patterns of diversity across natural landscapes. He has also contributed to the community monopolization hypothesis which states that evolution alters the assembly and eventual configuration of communities because initial colonists adapt to local conditions and affect the ability of future species to establish.[2]
Microgeographic adaptation
He and his colleagues defined and provided evidence for so-called microgeographic adaptation, the adaptation of populations at scales finer than expected based on their dispersal ability.[3] He suggests that adaptation might occur much more often at fine scales because migrants often do poorly outside of their local environment, thus affecting the realized gene flow. Microgeographic adaptation might therefore often affect local patterns of biodiversity than commonly expected.
Climate change biology
Urban has contributed to our understanding of climate change effects on species and communities. He described the biotic multipliers of climate change, which are species both sensitive to climate change and with disproportionate effects on communities and ecosystems.[4] These species are often top predators, and should be the ones to study first because they might have the greatest effects on other species.[5] He also helped develop the boxcar effect, whereby species in cooler regions prevent species in warmer regions from tracking their preferred thermal environment through competition.[6] Urban also showed that only evolution might be able to protect all diversity from climate change effects.[7] He recently found that the extinction risk from global warming not only increases with warmer temperatures, but actually accelerates.[8] His work suggests that if we follow a business-as-usual emissions climate change scenario, then 1 in 6 species could become threatened with extinction from climate change.[8][9][10] He has suggested that we still know too little about how climate change is affecting nature and need renewed efforts to predict and mediate its effects.[11][12]
Selected publications
Urban has published over 40 scientific articles (including five in Science, PNAS, and Nature Climate Change).
^Richardson, Jonathan L. (2014). "Microgeographic adaptation and the spatial scale of evolution". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 29 (3): 165–176. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2014.01.002. PMID24560373.
^Post, Eric (2013). Ecology of climate change: the importance of biotic interactions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 408. ISBN9781400846139.
^Urban, Mark; Richardson, Jonathon L. (2015). "The Evolution of foraging rate across local and geographic gradients in predation risk and competition". The American Naturalist. 186 (1): 16–32. doi:10.1086/681716. PMID26098352. S2CID16744103.
