Boldness Predicts Nest‐Site Choice of a Freshwater Turtle in an Anthropogenically Disturbed Landscape

ABSTRACT As urbanization continues to globally intensify, research across taxa seeks to understand which traits enable organisms to persist in anthropogenic landscapes. For oviparous animals, nest‐site choice is one behavioral trait with direct consequences for offspring fitness and, thus, population persistence. Therefore, empirical work assessing how variation in nesting behavior interfaces with urbanization will be imperative in predicting species response to human‐induced rapid environmental change. Behavioral boldness, or the propensity of an organism to engage in risky behavior across time or contexts, has been shown to influence nest‐site choice in urbanized landscapes across taxa. Much research documenting this relationship uses assessments of population‐level boldness across an urban‐to‐rural gradient. However, less is known about how individual‐level boldness may mediate nest‐site choice at finer scales within a single habitat. In this study, we use a nesting population of painted turtles ( Chrysemys picta ) to assess how individual‐level boldness influences nest‐site choice in an urbanized environment. We measured turtle antipredator and exploratory behavior in the field and tested for a relationship between boldness in these contexts and nest characteristics associated with anthropogenic disturbance. We demonstrate that one measure of boldness predicted nest distance from anthropogenic structures; turtles that showed a higher number of active defenses during simulated predation nested closer to anthropogenic structures. Yet, no other measures of boldness predicted nest distance to other measures of anthropogenic disturbance. Together, these findings show early evidence that select indicators of individual‐level boldness may mediate nest‐site choice in an urbanized landscape; ultimately encouraging future research into this relationship and the potential downstream consequences for offspring in this and other urbanized systems.