The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground

by Menno Schilthuizen

ISBN: 9780262049092

Published: 2025-04-01

A manifesto—and a field guide—for a new dawn of natural history, practiced by community scientists in their own urban jungle. Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that’s exactly what Menno Schilthuizen did—one instance in the evolutionary biologist’s campaign to take natural science to the urban landscape where most of us live today. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat—and maybe in the process do the natural world some good. Thanks to the open science revolution, real biological discoveries can now be made by anyone right where they live. Schilthuizen shows readers just how to go about making those discoveries, introducing them to...