ArticleScientific reports2015
Links between fear of humans, stress and survival support a non-random distribution of birds among urban and rural habitats.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Stress in the city: meta-analysis indicates no overall evidence for stress in urban vertebrates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Pooled it
- Environmental Drivers of Communal Roost Distribution and Size in Western Jackdaws (Coloeus monedula) Under Landscape Transformation.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Exploring stress and morphology in two songbird species across urban, agricultural, and natural habitats on San Cristobal Island, Galapagos.BMC zoology · 2025Article
- Feather corticosterone levels in the southern lapwing revealed no association with the degree of urbanization.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Article
- Urban birds become less fearful following COVID-19 reopenings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Among-species variation in hormone concentrations is associated with urban tolerance in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Drivers of the Ectoparasite Community and Co-Infection Patterns in Rural and Urban Burrowing Owls.Biology · 2022Article
- The Harris Hawk (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Selection on individuals of introduced species starts before the actual introduction.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- The power of community science to quantify ecological interactions in cities.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Urban life promotes delayed dispersal and family living in a non-social bird species.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Why we should care about movements: Using spatially explicit integrated population models to assess habitat source-sink dynamics.The Journal of animal ecology · 2020Article
- Differences in adrenocortical responses between urban and rural burrowing owls: poorly-known underlying mechanisms and their implications for conservation.Conservation physiology · 2020Article
- Article
- Personality-dependent breeding dispersal in rural but not urban burrowing owls.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Estimating age-dependent survival when juveniles resemble females: Invasive ring-necked parakeets as an example.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Parental habituation to human disturbance over time reduces fear of humans in coyote offspring.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Evolution of genomic variation in the burrowing owl in response to recent colonization of urban areas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Avian Emotions: Comparative Perspectives on Fear and Frustration.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
- Urban conservation hotspots: predation release allows the grassland-specialist burrowing owl to perform better in the city.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Urban endocrine ecology aims to understand how organisms cope with new sources of stress and maintain allostatic load to thrive in an increasingly urbanized world. Recent research efforts have yielded controversial results based on short-term measures of stress, without exploring its fitness effects. We measured feather corticosterone (CORTf, reflecting the duration and amplitude of glucocorticoid secretion over several weeks) and subsequent annual survival in urban and rural burrowing owls. This species shows high individual consistency in fear of humans (i.e., flight initiation distance, FID), allowing us to hypothesize that individuals distribute among habitats according to their tolerance to human disturbance. FIDs were shorter in urban than in rural birds, but CORTf levels did not differ, nor were correlated to FIDs. Survival was twice as high in urban as in rural birds and links with CORTf varied between habitats: while a quadratic relationship supports stabilizing selection in urban birds, high predation rates may have masked CORTf-survival relationship in rural ones. These results evidence that urban life does not constitute an additional source of stress for urban individuals, as shown by their near identical CORTf values compared with rural conspecifics supporting the non-random distribution of individuals among habitats according to their behavioural phenotypes.
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