Marina Alberti, a University of Washington professor of urban design and planning, studies how cities and natural ecosystems influence one another. UW News spoke to Alberti about how climate change is triggering evolutionary change within nature-based infrastructure projects — and what urban planners can do about it.
A study led by evolutionary biologists at multiple institutions, including the University of Washington, focuses on a specific plant in examining whether parallel evolution is occurring in cities all over the world.
Recent honors to University of Washington faculty and staff have come from the Association of Asian Studies, the American Society of Public Administration, the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and Cascade Public Media.
Here in what is called the Anthropocene era, humans and our urban environments appear to be driving accelerated evolutionary change in plants, animals, fungi, viruses and more — changes that could affect key ecosystem functions and thus human well-being. These interactions between evolution and ecology are called “eco-evolutionary feedback.” The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $500,000 grant to a multi-institution research network team headed by Marina Alberti, University of Washington professor of urban design and planning, to advance…
Here’s a quick look at some gift-worthy books and music created by UW talents in the last year or so — and a reminder of some perennial favorites.
A team of researchers including the UW’s Marina Alberti has devised a new classification scheme for the evolutionary stages of worlds based on “non-equilibrium thermodynamics” — a planet’s energy flow being out of synch, as the presence of life could cause.
A new multi-institution study led by the UW shows more clearly than ever that urbanization is affecting the genetic makeup of species that are crucial to ecosystem health and success.
What does it mean for a city to “think like a planet”? Marina Alberti of the UW College of Built Environments discusses her new book, “Cities that Think Like Planets,” published by UW Press.
We’ve long known that humans and our cities affect the ecosystem and even drive some evolutionary change. What’s new is that these evolutionary changes are happening more quickly than previously thought, and have potential impacts not in the distant future — but now.