SynthesisProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Stress in the city: meta-analysis indicates no overall evidence for stress in urban vertebrates.
Synthesis in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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
20 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- Phenotypic Flexibility in the City: A Meta-Analysis on Variation.Ecology letters · 2026Pooled it
- The impact of urbanization on health depends on the health metric, life stage and level of urbanization: a global meta-analysis on avian species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Pooled it
- Stress in the city: meta-analysis indicates no overall evidence for stress in urban vertebrates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Pooled it
- Adjusting to urban stress: How Eurasian tree sparrows modulate multiple physiological and nutritional markers across sexes.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Ectoparasite and blood parasite prevalence in birds: a comparative study between urbanized airport environments and natural habitats.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Exploring stress and morphology in two songbird species across urban, agricultural, and natural habitats on San Cristobal Island, Galapagos.BMC zoology · 2025Article
- Effects of Urbanization on Ventral Patch Size and Phenotypic Correlates of Patch Expression in Male Western Fence Lizards (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Recovery through resistance? nesting urban female song sparrows (Frontiers in physiology · 2025Article
- Feather corticosterone levels in the southern lapwing revealed no association with the degree of urbanization.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Article
- HPA flexibility andPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Article
- Baseline Corticosterone, Stress Responses, and Leukocyte Profiles in Chicks of Precocial Birds in Rural and Urban Environments.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Interactive effects of rising temperatures and urbanisation on birds across different climate zones: A mechanistic perspective.Global change biology · 2023Review
- Feather corticosterone reveals that urban great tits experience lower corticosterone exposure than forest individuals during dominance-rank establishment.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Birds living near airports do not show consistently higher levels of feather corticosterone.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Among-species variation in hormone concentrations is associated with urban tolerance in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Native species exhibit physiological habituation to invaders: a reason for hope.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Are behaviour and stress-related phenotypes in urban birds adaptive?The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Stress-induced changes in body surface temperature are repeatable, but do not differ between urban and rural birds.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Feather, But Not Plasma, Glucocorticoid Response to Artificial Light at Night Differs between Urban and Forest Blue Tit Nestlings.Integrative and comparative biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As cities continue to grow it is increasingly important to understand the long-term responses of wildlife to urban environments. There have been increased efforts to determine whether urbanization imposes chronic stress on wild animals, but empirical evidence is mixed. Here, we conduct a meta-analysis to test whether there is, on average, a detrimental effect of urbanization based on baseline and stress-induced glucocorticoid levels of wild vertebrates. We found no effect of urbanization on glucocorticoid levels, and none of sex, season, life stage, taxon, size of the city nor methodology accounted for variation in the observed effect sizes. At face value, our results suggest that urban areas are no more stressful for wildlife than rural or non-urban areas, but we offer a few reasons why this conclusion could be premature. We propose that refining methods of data collection will improve our understanding of how urbanization affects the health and survival of wildlife.
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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.