Foraging with friends, moving with anyone: effects of the social environment on movement-integrated habitat selection

• Authors:
  • Quinn M.R. Webber
  • Christina M. Prokopenko
  • Katrien A. Turner
  • Julie W. Turner
  • Eric Vander Wal

This repository contains the code accompanying the paper “Moving together, foraging apart: effects of the social environment on movement-integrated habitat selection”. Scripts are under R/. Input data are under are private as they contain sensitive locaitons of caribou, but data generated for subsequent analyses and used for figures are available under output/.

Find the paper at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.11.430740v2.full

Abstract

Movement links the distribution of habitats with the social environment of animals using those habitats; yet integrating movement, habitat selection, and socioecology remains an opportunity for further study. Here, our objective was to disentangle the roles of habitat selection and social association as drivers of collective movement in a gregarious ungulate. To accomplish this objective, we (1) assessed whether socially familiar individuals form discrete social communities and whether social communities have high spatial, but not necessarily temporal, overlap; and (2) we modelled the relationship between collective movement and selection of foraging habitats using socially informed integrated step selection analysis. Based on assignment of individuals to social communities and home range overlap analyses, individuals assorted into discrete social communities, and these communities had high spatial overlap. By unifying social network analysis with movement ecology, we identified movement-dependent social association, where individuals foraged with more familiar individuals, but moved collectively with any between foraging patches. Our study demonstrates that social behaviour and space use are inter-related based on spatial overlap of social communities and movement-dependent habitat selection. Movement, habitat selection, and social behaviour are linked in theory. Here, we put these concepts into practice to demonstrate that movement is the glue connecting individual habitat selection to the social environment.