ArticleScientific reports2016
Heritability of fear of humans in urban and rural populations of a bird species.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Species' urbanization time but not present urban tolerance predicts avian fear responses towards human.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Breeding barn swallows recognize householders from strangers.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Flight initiation distance and bird tolerance to humans in rural and urban habitats.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Drivers of Wolf Activity in a Human-Dominated Landscape and Its Individual Variability Toward Anthropogenic Disturbance.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Urban birds' tolerance towards humans was largely unaffected by COVID-19 shutdown-induced variation in human presence.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Personality traits differentially affect components of reproductive success in a Neotropical poison frog.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Intraspecific competition and individual behaviour but not urbanization affect the dietary patterns of a generalist avian predator.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bird tolerance to humans in open tropical ecosystems.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Coyotes in New York City Carry Variable Genomic Dog Ancestry and Influence Their Interactions with Humans.Genes · 2022Article
- Effects of climate variation on bird escape distances modulate community responses to global change.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Risk-taking behavior of bull-headed shrikes that recently colonized islands.Current zoology · 2021Article
- The Role of Animal Cognition in Human-Wildlife Interactions.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Article
- Differences in adrenocortical responses between urban and rural burrowing owls: poorly-known underlying mechanisms and their implications for conservation.Conservation physiology · 2020Article
- Testing the influence of habitat experienced during the natal phase on habitat selection later in life in Scandinavian wolves.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Dewlap size in male water anoles associates with consistent inter-individual variation in boldness.Current zoology · 2019Article
- Personality-dependent breeding dispersal in rural but not urban burrowing owls.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Parental habituation to human disturbance over time reduces fear of humans in coyote offspring.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Avian preference for close proximity to human habitation and its ecological consequences.Current zoology · 2018Article
- Evolution of genomic variation in the burrowing owl in response to recent colonization of urban areas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Flight initiation distance (FID), a measure of an animal's tolerance to human disturbance and a descriptor of its fear of humans, is increasingly employed for conservation purposes and to predict the response of species to urbanization. However, most work devoted to understanding variability in FID has been conducted at the population level and little is still known about inter-individual variability in this behaviour. We estimated the heritability of FID, a factor fundamental to understanding the strength and evolutionary consequences of selection of particular phenotypes associated with human disturbances. We used a population of burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) monitored long-term and for which FID was previously shown to be highly consistent across an individual's lifespan. Heritability estimates varied between 0.37 and 0.80, depending on the habitat considered (urban-rural) and method used (parent-offspring regressions or animal models). These values are unusually high compared with those previously reported for other behavioural traits. Although more research is needed to fully understand the underlying causes of this resemblance between relatives, selection pressures acting on this behaviour should be seriously considered as an important evolutionary force in animal populations increasingly exposed to human disturbance worldwide.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.