Data and R code for: Linking climate variability to demography in cooperatively breeding meerkats

This dryad repository contains data sets and R scripts for our Ecological Monographs (2025) paper: Linking climate variability to demography in cooperatively breeding meerkats. The aim of our study was to develop a mechanistic understanding of how variation in rainfall and temperature affect meerkat demography. Specifically, we:

Identified the critical period during which rainfall influences vegetation productivity at the field site.
Investigated how vegetation productivity and temperature influence meerkat foraging performance.
Examined how these climatic variables impact daily weight fluctuations and overall body condition.
Analyzed conditions under which meerkats fail to accumulate enough mass during foraging to offset overnight losses.
Explored the influence of body condition on reproduction and survival.
Projected future temperature trends and their implications for meerkat populations up to the mid and end of the century.

To achieve these aims, our study included numerous data sets and analyses which we detail in the README. 

Please note that the individual, group, and litter identities have been anonymised for this study. This is to prevent anyone from trying to link different studies carried out by the Kalahari Meerkat Project, and using the data to conduct their own analyses without knowledge of how the data have been processed, or of the system from which they derive. Within our specific study, the identities are relationally-linked, so that, for example, Individual "4" is consistent across data sets.

Methods
The data was collected as part of a long-term study of meerkats in the southern Kalahari Desert. All methods of data collection are outlined in the paper and are also summarised in Clutton-Brock and Manser (2016). The project's data is stored on a centralised SQL database and was processed for analyses by the lead author using R.  

All of the analyses are tied, directly or indirectly, to the effects of climate and/or vegetation productivity. Climate data included daily rainfall measured on-site, and temperature data taken from the NOAA Climate Prediction Centre. We also extracted future temperatures from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) for two future pathways: a medium-risk scenario (SSP2-4.5) and a high-risk scenario (SSP5-8.5), which we obtained from the Copernicus Climate Change service (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/). We selected the EC-EARTH3-CC model from CMIP6. Vegetation productivity was assessed using NDVI from the MODIS MOD13Q1 product the GIMMS NDVI3g product. 

Clutton-Brock, T.H., & Manser, M.B. (2016) Meerkat: cooperative breeding in the Kalahari. In Cooperative breeding in vertebrates. (eds, W.D. Koenig, & J.L. Dickinson), pp. 294-317. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107338357.018