Paige co-authored one of 16 articles in a special issue on urban evolution in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/cc/the-evolution-of-city-life

The editors produced a nice blog post about the special issue: http://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/the-evolution-of-city-life/

Collectively, the editors say, “papers in this Special Feature highlight the power of cities as a globally replicated experiment that provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand how human-altered environments, and particularly cities, affect the evolution of life around us. In this context there are three take-aways from the 15 papers published in this Special Feature. First, studies on ants, plants, birds, and bees have all shown that cities frequently alter natural selection. Second, this altered selection frequently leads urban populations to be better adapted to cities than their nonurban counterparts, an effect which is often consistent across different cities. Third, the development of cities has given rise to new human commensal species, as in the case of house sparrows, which have evolved to thrive on starch-rich diets commonly found in human-dominated landscapes.“

Our contribution shows that species interactions like pollination can play a role in mediating effects of natural selection on plant traits. However, these effects are sometimes rather modest, and the strength of their effect on natural selection can vary from year to year.