City Clocks Group

We seek to uncover the strategies that animals adopt to cope with global environmental change. In particular, we study how rhythms of life on both a daily and seasonal scale are tuned to city life.

 

We are a highly multidisplinary research group that integrate mechanisms and functions via controlled captive experiments as well as long-term data collection in the field. Our research spans from genes to molecules, to behaviour and populations. We used tools and approaches as diverse as gene expression analysis, metabolomics, behavioural observations, biotelemetry, statistical analyses of biological rhythms and time-series, mark-recapture modelling.

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Cities are one of the few landscapes on Earth that are increasing in spatial extent. More people live now in urban than rural areas, and even more are projected to embrace city life in the near future. Thus, it is crucial to understand how we should build, manage and plan our cities in order to ensure that they will be able to sustain functional ecosystems where wild species can thrive and biodiversity can flourish. Moreover, urban environments are relatively novel evolutionary speaking, and most species are still adapting to city life. Cities are therefore a unique opportunities to observe, measure and understand evolution in real time.  

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Our major research questions focus on:

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• Circadian rhythms

• Phenology

• Light pollution

• Noise

• Multi-sensory stimuli

• Anthropogenic food resources

• Life-history strategies

• Evolutionary ecology

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