Sylvana Ross

From Red Lines to Ant Trails: How History Shapes Urban Nature

Cities are more than just buildings and roads—they’re human-made ecosystems. We’ve designed these ecosystems with highways, malls, schools, parking lots, and expanses of pavement, which shape the lives of the animals that live alongside us. From birds that sing louder to be heard over traffic, to lizards with longer limbs for climbing walls, to coyotes navigating neighborhoods, city wildlife is adapting in surprising ways.

But U.S. cities were also built with deep racial prejudice, including the practice of redlining, where neighborhoods were graded and segregated by race. These patterns still shape communities today, with formerly redlined neighborhoods experiencing more concrete, hotter temperatures, and greater pollution. In this talk, I’ll also share my research on the odorous house ant, a common urban insect, and how ants from different neighborhoods handle heat stress.

Together, we’ll explore how history, ecology, and community science can help us understand the legacy of racism on urban nature—and what this means for future policy and city design.

Sylvana Ross graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor’s degree in biology, where she studied mate choice and visual systems in jumping spiders. After graduation, she started teaching environmental after-school programs and saw firsthand the empathy students had for the world they were growing up in. She joined Queen City Pollinator Project in February 2020 and became a science educator and beekeeper, teaching lower-income communities about pollinators in urban ecosystems and the evolutionary mysteries that are unraveling within their city. Currently, she is in her fourth year of her PhD in Dr. Corrie Moreau’s lab in the Entomology Department at Cornell University. Her research focuses on how urban environments shape insect evolution, specifically how racial segregation and city design affect ant populations. She hopes her work not only helps protect urban ecosystems but also inspires equitable environmental policies and encourages more diverse and creative minds to find a place in science.