Literature review on the effect of conspecific density on animal dispersal (2000-2023)

We review empirical studies of animal dispersal in relation to conspecific
density to examine the evidence for density-dependent dispersal among taxa
and test whether reports of its occurrence are taxon-specific and/or
biased by the methodology employed. We conducted a thorough review of the
literature (2000 - 2023) and found k = 97 empirical studies of amphibians,
birds, fishes, invertebrates, mammals, or reptiles that had tested for a
correlation between conspecific density and animal dispersal. From each,
we derived the correlation coefficient of the relationship between density
and dispersal, which we z-transformed to obtain the effect size,
Zr. We also extracted and compiled information on
taxonomic group, sex, age, migratory behavior, experimental setup,
dispersal metric, density metric, and variable type, as well as temporal
and spatial scale to test their relationships with Zr using linear
regressions and multilevel mixed-effect modeling.