ABSTRACT
Landscapes have been, and continue to be, dramatically altered by anthropogenic activity. Pervasive and obvious structural changes are clear in urbanized areas, but even many rural areas are profoundly altered by agriculture, transportation networks, and other industrialized infrastructure. These human alterations not only result in structural disturbance of the environment, including habitat fragmentation, but are often accompanied by other factors such as chemical, noise or light pollution, and severe losses in biodiversity, among others. Avian urban ecology examines the ways in which birds adapt to anthropogenic impacts associated with urbanization. Though now a well-established field, studies of urban ecology are still largely focused on population-level investigations. For example, do populations respond to anthropogenic change via avoidance/attraction, adjustment (e.g., through reversible behavioural plasticity or developmental plasticity), or adaptation? This chapter begins by providing examples of these types of population-level studies. However, within populations, individuals often show repeatable differences in their average behaviour (i.e., animal personality), or repeatable differences in suites of correlated traits (i.e., behavioural syndromes; see Box 1 for a glossary of key terms). The chapter describes these phenomena in detail before moving on to discuss the ways in which explicit recognition of animal personality and behavioural syndromes can enrich understanding of the ecological and evolutionary impacts of anthropogenic change on songbirds. The chapter ends with a discussion of questions related to the ecology and evolution of animal personality in the Anthropocene and suggestions for important areas of future research on this topic.
