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

By Menno Schilthuizen

A manifesto – and field guide – for a new dawn of natural history practised 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.

In The Urban Naturalist, the evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen invites us to venture 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 us how to go about making these discoveries, introducing us to the tools of the trade of the urban community scientist, from the tried and tested (the field notebook, the butterfly net and the hand lens) to the new-fangled (internet resources, low-tech gadgets and off-the-shelf gizmos). But beyond technology, his book holds the promise of reviving the lost tradition of the citizen scientist – rekindling the spirit of the Victorian naturalist for the modern world.

At a time when the only nature most people get to see is urban, The Urban Naturalist demonstrates that understanding the novel ecosystems around us is our best hope for appreciating and protecting biodiversity.