ArticleCommunications biology2021
Mammalian body size is determined by interactions between climate, urbanization, and ecological traits.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 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
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anthropogenic modification shifts pollinator phenology in the eastern USA.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Body size and cranial shape differentiation in urban and rural house mice (bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- An integrated social-ecological-evolutionary-phenotypic (SEEP) approach to understanding animal responses to urbanization.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Extending mammal specimens with their essential phenotypic traits.Journal of mammalogy · 2025Article
- Unraveling the determinants of body size shifts in a rodent species in the Zhoushan Archipelago, China.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Structural and Functional Responses of Small Mammal Communities to Land Abandonment in a Region of High Biodiversity.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Climate-Driven Body Size Changes in Birds and Mammals Reveal Environmental Tolerance Limits.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Body-Size Change in a Rodent Is Affected by Environmental Warming and Population-Specific Thermoneutral Zone.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Climate but Not Land Use Influences Body Size of Fowler's Toad (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Tracking the Morphological Trends inLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Integrating animal tracking and trait data to facilitate global ecological discoveries.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Morphological Variation in the Striped Field Mouse Across Three Countries.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- The extent of the hip bone sexual dimorphism in two Italian coeval modern skeletal samples.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Adaptation in the Alleyways: Candidate Genes Under Potential Selection in Urban Coyotes.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- How Does Landscape Structure Affect Dung Beetle Assemblages in Amazon Cities?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Extreme Body Condition Index Values in Small Mammals.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Assessing Ecogeographic Rules in Two Sigmodontine Rodents along an Elevational Gradient in Central Chile.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Body size and trophic structure explain global asymmetric response of tetrapod diversity to climate effects.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Urbanization, climate and species traits shape mammal communities from local to continental scales.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- A practical guide to collections-based research on ecogeographic rules.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Anthropogenically-driven climate warming is a hypothesized driver of animal body size reductions. Less understood are effects of other human-caused disturbances on body size, such as urbanization. We compiled 140,499 body size records of over 100 North American mammals to test how climate and human population density, a proxy for urbanization, and their interactions with species traits, impact body size. We tested three hypotheses of body size variation across urbanization gradients: urban heat island effects, habitat fragmentation, and resource availability. Our results demonstrate that both urbanization and temperature influence mammalian body size variation, most often leading to larger individuals, thus supporting the resource availability hypothesis. In addition, life history and other ecological factors play a critical role in mediating the effects of climate and urbanization on body size. Larger mammals and species that utilize thermal buffering are more sensitive to warmer temperatures, while flexibility in activity time appears to be advantageous in urbanized areas. This work highlights the value of using digitized, natural history data to track how human disturbance drives morphological variation.
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.