The ecosystem response to urban transformation: the impact of rapid urbanisation on the social demographics of ecologically-significant insect species

Landscapes across the world are undergoing rapid urbanisation. We will investigate the role of urban living in the life of an ecologically prominent social insect, wasps of the genus Polistes in Brazil. Do urbanised landscapes host higher densities of colonies? Does life in artificial environments recalibrate the demographics of social species? Does this have implications for social behaviour? Is an urbanised world a new ecological context to which social behaviour must adapt? Are ancestral evolutionary strategies helped or hindered by the transition to urbanisation? We will address fascinating questions such as these through thorough behavioural analyses of Brazil's polistine wasps, using a host of cutting-edge technologies - including advanced sociogenomics (the study of social behaviour and the genome) and intricate radio-tagging of wasps in the wild.

The project:

- Builds advanced technological capacity in the economically-important life sciences sector, an economic powerhouse. It will expedite the establishment of Professor Nascimento's lab as a world-class leader in behavioural ecology.

- Techniques are of wide relevance to urgent questions confronting Brazilian biologists.

- Provides knowledge transfer impacts for Brazil and UK through student exchanges

- In-situ training

- Field and lab collaboration

- Uses UK strengths for capacity-building. Sumner's lab pioneered both radio-monitoring and sociogenomics; thus, the UK is excellently placed to provide the Brazilian partner with training and expertise to up-skill their own interdisciplinary approach to understanding and protecting Brazilian biodiversity. Work by Sumner's lab using these methods has resulted in high-impact publications in Nature, Current Biology, Genome Biology, and Proc. R. Soc.

- Will be the first to incorporate these two innovations together; thus, is primed for high-impact output, to the benefit of wider ecology and society.