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.

中文翻译：

---

城市中的压力：荟萃分析表明没有总体证据表明城市脊椎动物有压力


随着城市的不断发展，了解野生动物对城市环境的长期反应变得越来越重要。人们越来越努力地确定城市化是否给野生动物带来了长期压力，但经验证据好坏参半。在这里，我们进行了一项荟萃分析，以根据野生脊椎动物的基线和应激诱导的糖皮质激素水平来测试城市化平均是否存在有害影响。我们发现城市化对糖皮质激素水平没有影响，并且性别、季节、生命阶段、分类、城市规模和方法都不能解释观察到的效应大小的变化。从表面上看，我们的结果表明，城市地区对野生动物的压力并不比农村或非城市地区更大，但我们提供了一些理由来说明为什么这个结论可能还为时过早。我们建议完善数据收集方法将提高我们对城市化如何影响野生动物的健康和生存的理解。