About this Research Topic

Background

Urbanization is currently considered one of the most extreme human impacts on the Earth's ecosystems. At a global scale, urban areas are growing faster than any other human-induced landscape change with a projected increase of 200% by the year 2030 according to the UN. This global process of land use transformation is associated with important environmental changes such as alteration of habitat structure, ecosystem functioning, and biodiversity. Its negative effects on biodiversity are particularly relevant with a perspective of aggravation in the near future. This situation yields an important trade-off for concealing urban development and biodiversity conservation.

Despite the relevance of the topic and the increasing number of studies on Urban Ecology, there are still important gaps in our knowledge about the impact of urbanization on biodiversity. The lack of urban studies on insects is particularly remarkable. Insects are a key group for understanding the impact of urbanization on biodiversity given their high diversity (50% of global eukaryote biodiversity), broad distribution, economic importance, and ecological roles in key processes such as pollination, nutrient recycling, or regulation of trophic networks. However, studies on urban insects are clearly underrepresented in the Urban Ecology literature. It is needed to fulfill this gap considering recent research recommendations on how to reconcile urban development and biodiversity conservation, such as the importance of urban landscape organization as well as the measure of multiple biodiversity components (i.e. taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity) simultaneously because they might be affected differently by the same process.

In this Research Topic we aim to encourage the study of urban insects from a wide variety of perspectives: (ecological, evolutionary, conservation, genetics...) with a special focus on applied research proposing measures that can be implemented by city planners in order to build more sustainable cities.

We welcome Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Reviews as well as Mini-Reviews.

Some examples of possible research lines to be submitted include:
• Urban insect diversity vs natural habitat diversity
• Ecological functions performed by urban insects
• Changes in behavior/phenology of insects that live in cities
• Effects of urban landscape organization on population genetics and dispersal
• Consequences of air/light/acoustic pollution on urban insects

Keywords: Biodiversity, Conservation, Ecology, Insects, Urbanization

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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