During the millennia, humans and rats have adapted to live in urban environments. The sharing of common habitat has not been without its problems. Urban rats can cause structural damage to buildings, eat foodstuffs and carry zoonotic diseases. For these natural aspects of their lives, humans have been afrad of rats and hated rats. In most developed cities, there are continuous operations against rats to try limit their population sizes and get rid of rats in wrong places from human perspective. These are costly and quite often ineffective.
From researchers point of view, rats offer an unique opportunity to do basic science. Rats live in highly controlled and well-known environments, mesocosms of one sort. We have ample amounts of biotic and abiotic spatial data on Helsinki city area, due to open data collected by the city for other purposes. This can be used to analyze how climate, weather, urban structures, urban nature or history affect the rat populations. In turn, the same data can be used to study parasite and disease spread between rats.
Rats elicit strong emotional reactions from humans. Thus they are also an interesting study subject for human-wildlife conflict. Actually, it might one the most important conflicts humans have as it is truly a global conflict which have been going on for millennia. We are also far from solving this conflict and it is surprisingly little studied. Nevertheless, the urbanization leads to more and more people living in cities, with more and more contact with urban rats.
We will use citizen science apporaches to understand rat population dynamics over the whole city of Helsinki and at the same time offer people an opportunity to reflect their relationship with rats. Citizen science is an obvious approach here, as the local residents have usually a solid understanding where the rat hotspots in each neighbourhood are. Urban nature is usually seen in positive light, while rats are seen in negative light. We will explore this conflict and how humans and rats can best cohabit the urban areas.
Rats are one of the most common urban mammals. While billions of euros are used globally to control rat populations, the effects of control measures are not well-known. Rat populations usually rebound quickly after eradication attempts, but we do not know how this lethal control affect disease spread in urban environment or how effective it even is in controlling rat populations.
This research project will assess how eradication campaigns affect rat movement, rat population structure and rat-borne pathogen dynamics. The research will be carried out in central Helsinki in cooperation with city officials, local residents and pest management companies. Based on our study results we can better understand the effects of pest management on urban rat populations. More broadly, urban rats can potentially function as a powerful model system for anthropogenic influences on the wildlife.
Four-year project is funded by Research Council Finland.
The significance of waste varies among both humans and other species. "One man's waste is another man's treasure" holds true for urban rats foraging for food waste, as they depend on human material flows. In this project, we examine how waste sorting and processing is organized in a multicultural and multispecies society and what they tell us about the significance of waste. We examine the possibilities of transformative learning in shaping the citizenships of immigrants, so-called native Finns and rats. When collecting data, analyzing it and making recommendations, we approach the expectations and possibilities of waste citizenship, taking social, political, cultural, ecological and economic dimensions into account.
Waste is an excellent focal point for research, because it binds people to their environment and to other species, sometimes in an unpleasant way. We combine natural sciences, social sciences and educational sciences when we study the practices and consequences of waste processing and environmental citizenship from a systemic perspective.
Three-year project is funded by Kone Foundation.
The pathogens transmitted from the animals to humans, i.e., zoonoses, are an emerging threat for human health. Globally, rats are one of the most significant sources of zoonotic diseases, but in Finland, other species are maybe more relevant. We will survey the seroprevalence of zoonotic pathogens in people working in occupations that work with rodents and we assess how large zoonotic risks these people encounter.
Two-year project was funded by Finnish Work Environment Fund.
The goal of this project was to study the conflicts that arise between gardeners concerning the non-human inhabitants (rodents, birds, insects, stray animals) of urban allotment gardens, and to understand how these conflicts are resolved. As the project examined different urban allotment gardens in Finland, it allowed for comparisons between the different cultural and spatial contexts. The data gathered in this project consisted of interviews with the gardeners and ecological observations (via recorded camera footage) of the species inhabiting the gardens. It offered an insight into urban biodiversity and its preservation, and the project results will help provide new knowledge to combat the current collapse in biodiversity.
Two-year project was funded by Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation and it is led by Karolina Lukasik. It ran from 2023 to 2025.
How many rats there are in Helsinki? How do the population sizes vary between summer and winter? Do rats in Helsinki breed around the year? How much does the coldness of winters impact rat populations? By using three distinct data sets, school student collected track plate data, pest management company generated smart trap data and sightings by trash pick-up personnel, we aim to understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban rat populations. These can be then combined to environmental data readily available for the urban area.
Where do the rats go during the wintertime? What kind of social lives do the rats have? Rats are notoriously difficult to monitor and their spatial use in urban areas is subsequently poorly understood. We are exploring ways how rat movement can be detected by live-trapping and marking, using wildlife cameras and by the means of population genetics.
How do rat movement is controlled? Who does decisions on rat killing? Where do the information from the "rat problem" come from? We are doing ethnographies, interviews and questionnaires on the professionals who make the network of rodent control, from the municipal authorities to the pest management professionals.
What do rats look like? What kind of emotions do they inspire? Our artists are looking ways to connect with rats and to show the nature of the urban rats through wildlife cameras, experimental photography and art installations. The lense of the camera separates but also ultimately unites rat and human and intertwines the subject and object of the art.
This study is funded by Kone Foundation. This project ran from 2020 to 2024.
How do imagine hopeful futures with difficult urban companions? We explored non-anthropocentric education by giving the voice to those usually sidestepped in both science and in urban decision-making: young people and unloved species.
We produced new knowledge and solutions with a three-tier approach, based on collaboration between researchers, young people and experts. Three progressive research stages included methods from natural sciences, human sciences and the arts. This produced new knowledge of rethinking exclusive human agency in society, of imagining multispecies futures, and of how young people best come to learn about sustainable co-living.
This project was funded by Academy of Finland and ran by Pauliina Rautio in the Univeristy of Oulu and ran from 2020 to 2024.
Why do people feed birds? How do people make sure that the feed goes to nice animals? Urban human citizens often feed birds, as they see it a rewarding way of helping wildlife. Nevertheless, the bird-feeding often attracts urban rats to spaces, which humans have meant for birds. As humans have generally negative disposition towards rats, the bird-feeding have been prohibited in different public and private spaces. This multispecies entanglement is dynamics and in continuous flux: currently, the rat population sizes are increasing, the bird-feeding activity is decreasing and the city of Helsinki is partially removing the bird feeding prohibitions. The relationship between bird feeding and rats is also causing conflicts between humans.
We explored the historical context of bird feeding through feeding practices, regulations and guidelines, to understand where that specific human-wildlife conflict has emerged.
This study was funded by HELSUS – Helsinki Institute of Sustainability and HiLIFE – Helsinki Institute of Life Sciences. This project ran from 2022 to 2024.
Rats have a reputation of being dirty and disease-ridden animals. While they are substantial reservoir for pathogens and parasites in warmer regions, there is less research done in rats in boreal regions. We don't know which parasite species the rats are carrying and whether they could infect pets or humans, but our parasite surveys will at least give some idea what there is.
We are working on viral, bacterial and helminth parasites trying to first describe the community of rat symbionts and then analyze parasite dynamics in the context of spatial and temporal variation in the host populations.
This study is funded by Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation, City of Helsinki and Emil Aaltonen Foundation. Lassila & Tikanoja Oyj has sponsored a mobile laboratory for our use. This project ran from 2018 to 2023.
How do rats shape urban areas? Rats have been synanthropic species for millenia and they have travelled over the whole world with humans. Humans have a complex, yet usually difficult to notice, adaptations to keep rats in check.
We have done questionnaires for municipal workers on their perceptions on the present and future of the rodent control. This work has been used to surveying who works with rats and how the cooperation between different stakeholders work.
This study was funded by KAKS - Kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö and it ran from 2019 to 2021.