Data from: Spatial–social familiarity complements the spatial–social interface: evidence from Yellowstone bison

This dataset can be used to reproduce the results from Merkle et al. 2024,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The abstract of that
study is as follows. Social animals make behavioural decisions based on
local habitat and conspecifics, as well as memoriszed past experience
(i.e., ‘familiarity’) with habitat and conspecifics. Here, we develop a
conceptual and empirical understanding of how spatial and social
familiarity fit within the spatial-–social interface – —a novel framework
integrating the spatial and social components of animal behaviour. We
conducted a multi-scale analysis of the movements of GPS-collared plains
bison (Bison bison, n = 66) residing in and around Yellowstone National
Park, USA. We found that both spatial and social familiarity mediate how
individuals respond to their spatial and social environments. For
instance, individuals with high spatial familiarity rely on their own
knowledge as opposed to their conspecifics’, and individuals with high
social familiarity rely more strongly on the movement of conspecifics to
guide their own movement. We also found that fine-scale spatial and social
phenotypes often scale up to broad-scale phenotypes. For instance, bison
that select more strongly to align with their nearest neighbour have
larger home ranges. By integrating spatial and social familiarity into the
spatial-–social interface, we demonstrate the utility of the interface for
testing hypotheses, while also highlighting the pervasive importance of
cognitive mechanisms in animal behaviour.