Data from: The role of social and ecological processes in structuring animal populations: a case study from automated tracking of wild birds

Animal societies, Dispersal, Great tit Parus major, Group living, Immigration, Social organisation
Abstract: Both social and ecological factors influence population process and structure, with resultant consequences for phenotypic selection on individuals. Understanding the scale and relative contribution of these two factors is thus a central aim in evolutionary ecology. In this study, we develop a framework using null models to identify the social and spatial patterns that contribute to phenotypic structure in a wild population of songbirds. We used automated technologies to track 1053 individuals that formed 73 737 groups from which we inferred a social network. Our framework identified that both social and spatial drivers contributed to assortment in the network. In particular, groups had a more even sex ratio than expected, and exhibited a consistent age structure that suggested local association preferences, such as preferential attachment or avoidance. In contrast, recent immigrants were spatially partitioned in space, suggesting differential dispersal strategies from locally-born individuals. Our results highlight how different scales of social decision-making, ranging from post-natal dispersal settlement to fission-fusion dynamics, can interact to drive phenotypic structure in animal populations.