Environmental variability as a predictor of behavioral flexibility in urban environments

Global urbanization processes have highlighted the importance of understanding the effects of urban habitats on animal behavior. Behavioral changes are usually evaluated along an urbanization gradient, comparing urban and rural populations. However, this metric fails to consider heterogeneity between urban habitats that can differ significantly in their characteristics, such as their level of environmental variability. We suggest incorporating dimensions of environmental variability into the urbanization metric. We tested the importance of both level of urbanization and level of urban stability (the rate of anthropogenic changes) on animals' behavioral flexibility by comparing reversal learning abilities in house sparrows from sites differing in the rate of urban development over time. We show that at least for males, urban stability better explains levels of behavioral flexibility than urbanization level. We further show that urban stability corresponds to other behavioral traits such ...

全球城市化进程凸显了探究城市生境对动物行为影响的重要性。当前通常通过沿城市化梯度设置对照，对比城市与乡村种群的行为差异来评估动物的行为变化。然而，该评估指标未考虑城市生境间的异质性——不同城市生境的特征（如环境变异性水平）可能存在显著差异。我们建议将环境变异性维度纳入城市化评估指标体系。本研究通过对比不同城市化速率随时间变化的样地内家麻雀的反转学习（reversal learning）能力，检验了城市化水平与城市稳定性（即人为活动变化速率）对动物行为灵活性的影响。研究结果表明，至少对于雄性个体而言，城市稳定性对行为灵活性水平的解释力优于城市化水平。本研究还进一步证实，城市稳定性与其他行为性状（如……）存在关联。