Description

Rats have lived with humans since the beginning of agriculture. Rats have also been studied by scientists in laboratories around the globe and we know quite lot about them. Nevertheless, we do not really know what they are doing when they live wild in city parks, sewers and tunnels, in their evolutionary new and ever-changing habitat. Our research project aims to uncover the spatio-temporal variation in rat populations, how rats share and spread parasites and pathogens and how humans feel and think about rats in urban setting.

HURP is multidisciplinary research project on ecology, evolution, genetics, history, visual arts, educational sciences and social sciences of urban rats in Helsinki.

Current and past subprojects of HURP include:

• Urban rat as a model species looks at the effects of the lethal rodent management on rat populations, rat-borne pathogens and to the risk caused by cross-species pathogen and parasite transmission.
• Boundless rat – a multidisciplinary study on rat movement looked at the rat movement from the viewpoints of rats and humans by trapping and tracking rats and interviewing and doing ethnography with humans.
• CitiRats – Citizens with Rats introduce a three-tier progression where young people participated in ecological citizen science, then multispecies ethnography and finally into a speculative fiction writing.
• Cohabitation with undesired others in urban spaces – from theory to practice explored the history of birdfeeding in Helsinki from late 19^th century into current day and especially focused on the birdfeeders as a multispecies technology
• ​​​​​​​Rat as a municipal resident studied the municipal workers’ perceptions of past, current and future rodent management with a questionnaire.

Publications

• Lähdesmäki, H., Aivelo, T. & Savolainen, P. 2024. Bird feeding devices exclude unwelcome visitors. More-than-humans shaping the architecture and technology of birdfeeders in twentieth-century Finland. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241242680
• Kervinen, A., Hohti, R., Rautio, P., Saari, MH., Tammi, T., &Aivelo, T. 2024. Ratty places–unsettling human-centeredness in ecological inquiry with young people Environmental Education Research, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2024.2314037
• Aivelo, T.,Koivisto, E., Esther, A., Koivisto, S. & Huitu, O. 2023. VKORC1-based resistance to anticoagulant rodenticides widespread in Finnish house mice but not in brown rats. International Journal of Pest Management, https://doi.org/10.1080/09670874.2023.2234324
• Kervinen, A. & Aivelo, T. 2023. Secondary school students' responses to epistemic uncertainty during an ecological citizen science inquiry. Science Education, 107, 1352–1379. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21809
• Rautio, P., Tammi, T. Aivelo, T., Hohti, R., Kervinen, A., Saari, M.  2022. ”For whom? By whom?” Critical perspectives of participation in ecological citizen science. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 17:765-793. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10099-9
• Aivelo, T. & Huovelin, S. 2020: Combining formal education and citizen science: A case study on students’ perceptions of learning and interest in an urban rat project. Environmental Education Research, 26:324-340. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1727860

More information

On the University of Helsinki website, you can find out more about the Urban Rats project.

• disease ecology
• environmental policy
• movement ecology
• population modelling
• posthumanism
• visual arts