Prugh, LauraKreling, Samantha Erin Sophia2025-05-122025-05-122025-05-122025Kreling_washington_0250E_27872.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/52993Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025Our increasingly urbanized world offers species substantial benefits and drawbacks. Those species able to establish populations in urban areas will find ample food and water resources, but also higher conspecific densities, increased interactions with humans, and higher risk of vehicular mortality. Cities are a new phenomenon in evolutionary time, and those species able to cope with the novelty often display specific qualities like dietary generalism and rapid reproduction rates. However, our understanding of how urban areas fundamentally change the eco-evolutionary dynamics of these species is limited. Here I present conceptual details and empirical data collected with non-invasive methods that demonstrate how these eco-evolutionary dynamics are altered for an adaptable mesocarnivore, the coyote (Canis latrans). The coyote can serve as a model species for understanding eco-evolutionary dynamics across North America as they persist in nearly every ecosystem type and every major metropolitan region. In this dissertation, I begin with a conceptual piece elucidating how urbanization and increased interactions with people may fundamentally alter the evolutionary constraints on wildlife coloration via 11 genetic and non-genetic mechanisms. Chapter 2 builds upon the literature on urban gene flow barriers. This chapter highlights how linear barriers can lead to fine-scale genetic structuring. In Chapter 3, I build upon this city-wide gene flow analysis and model drivers of genetic connectivity from Northeastern Washington to the Kitsap Peninsula, demonstrating different gene flow drivers for different ecosystem types. Geneflow appeared largely driven by impervious surface, location on an island versus the mainland, and water. Geographic distance was a much stronger predictor of genetic distance in urban areas, indicating that dispersal distances are limited and coyotes are likely displaying natal-biased dispersal patterns. In addition, comparison of our urban and wildland areas to three physical islands suggests that gene flow in our urban areas is more similar to that of islands with a bridge to the mainland than that of wildland areas. For Chapter 4, I deploy state-of-the-art metabarcoding methodology to understand coyote diet with the city of Seattle. I predict that coyote diet should mirror human diet where they are eating large amounts of anthropogenic resources and that access to natural prey depends on access to green space. Since green space is largely distributed in Seattle by wealth and access to healthy foods is inequitably distributed, I predicted that coyote diet would largely be driven by human social variables. I found that drivers of different dietary categories varied and that both social and environmental variables were important for understanding urban coyote diets. Lastly, in Chapter 5, I compare diet diversity and niche partitioning among wildland, island, and urban coyotes. I predicted that urban areas would have the highest degrees of individual specialization with an increased diversity of resources to specialize in. Instead, I found that wildland areas have the highest degrees of specialization, likely indicating that urban areas see decreased inter and intraspecific competition as a result of anthropogenic food supplementation and increased resource availability despite increased conspecific densities. Taken together, this body of research demonstrates the eco-evolutionary dynamics that are changed as a result of urbanization, using the coyote as a model species.application/pdfen-USnonegene flowmetabarcodingurban ecologyEnvironmental scienceGeneticsWildlife conservationForestryThesis