Behind the Paper: Holobiont Urbanism

This “Behind the Paper” blog post describes the multispecies approach to defining the research question featured in our paper Holobiont Urbanism: sampling urban beehives reveals cities’ metagenomes published in Environmental Microbiome in 2022.

We set out to reimagine each city we live in as far more than a human metropolis, instead revealing it as a complex and adaptive biological superstructure.

Worth noting, however, is that our goals in the project extended beyond gathering, analyzing and releasing the data. The initial distribution of the ideas, data, and imagery from this work were not in a published paper for scientists to read, but rather in the cultural context of the Venice Architecture Biennale.