Many recent studies have explicitly evaluated the impact of urbanization on the evolution of urban dwelling organisms with a purpose of conserving native species (Beninde et al., 2016 Johnson & Munshi‐South, 2017 Munshi‐South, Zolnik, & Harris, 2016), whereas relatively fewer such studies (Richardson et al., 2017) have explicitly assessed such an impact on the evolution of human commensal species. Rapid urbanization in recent decades has created a unique artificial landscape, the urban landscape, which now occupies a significant proportion of the earth's surface (Seto, Fragkias, Güneralp, & Reilly, 2011). By pinpointing a range of ecological and socio‐economic variables determining the distribution and dispersal of pigeons, our study provides urban planners with the tools for optimal management of this human commensal, such as a curtailment of the practice of mercy feeding and modifications to the urban landscape to reduce pigeon density and to lower the likelihood of repopulation by dispersal. Landscape genomic analyses of great precision pointed to the presence of dense trees as agents of resistance to dispersal, whereas a high road density reduces this resistance. In specific, rock pigeons in Singapore lack sex‐biased dispersal and are clustered with a genetic patch size of ~3 km. Genomic analyses demonstrated that rock pigeons in Singapore form a single population possibly derived from rapid expansion from a genetically homogenous group of founder individuals. Our distance sampling results indicated that the volume of intentional “mercy feeding” and availability of high‐rise buildings are the most reliable predictors of high pigeon densities in Singapore. In this study, we performed (a) hierarchical distance sampling on ~400 island‐wide point transects, (b) a population genomic inquiry based on ~7,000 SNPs from almost 150 individuals, and (c) landscape genomic analyses on the basis of extensive ecological and socio‐economic databases to characterize the distribution and dispersal patterns of rock pigeons across Singapore. ![]() However, the human‐mediated factors governing its distribution and dispersal are not well understood. The rock pigeon, Columba livia, is a cosmopolitan human commensal, domesticated thousands of years ago.
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