Right. It's a small step for now, but helps establish some basic mechanisms that can be used for intelligent behaviors later.
A big concept this works towards is perceived threat vs. actual threat. By enabling individuals to move/act based on how much danger they "think" they're in, we can enable players (and creatures) the opportunity to "trick" them. This makes them intelligent enough to be exploited, and ideally that'll be reflected in their evolution patterns as well.
You know... That same datapoint could feed into a sort of long-term "Migration" system too, where creature species in a localized region have some form of tolerance threshold ceiling and/or rate-over-time for threat, where surpassing it results in the dramatic decision for them to attempt to migrate regions.
Could ultimately work well for them or for the new regions' species, or terribly, or some combination. Plus it might deprive the OLD region from an important food source or otherwise destabilize it, resulting in a natural cascade migration/extinction/regrowth effect. The idea of an Apex predator feeling so threatened they shift regions only to THEN completely destabilize the region they shifted towards... that sounds like a delightful interaction.
Such a system might indirectly result in Species that feel threatened by humans ending up naturally moving away if human population centers get closer (b/c it would be causing an increase in traffic e.g. "threat" application).
And probably would need to apply a statistic approach to account for outlier scenarios, like where humans decide to just bully the same one/two individual creatures but the rest of the species in the region is left alone? Plus some kind of "transition period buff" to give the environment time to at least try to stabilize after a migraine event occurs.
