Behaviour across time and space–how large scale ‘trait-based’ approaches can shape behavioural ecology

Understanding the responses of organisms to environmental change is
critical to tackling the grand challenges of 21st century biology. Fields
such as environmental physiology and ecology have embraced these
challenges by shifting the scale of scientific enquiry and utilising
large-scale comparative approaches. Behavioural research has not yet
realised this potential to the same extent. We argue that adopting a
trait-based approach at spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales for
behavioural ecology can advance the field and address emerging questions
in biology. We surveyed the literature in the well-known and long running
behaviour journals (Animal Behaviour, Behavioural Ecology and Behavioural
Ecology and Sociobiology), and ecology journals (Ecology, Journal of
Ecology and Oecologia) between 1981 and 2020 (1990-2020 for Behavioral
Ecology, which has only been in publication since 1990). We extracted
metadata on citation numbers, and whether the artcle have multispecies and
multi populations approach, and whether the artcle were animal or plant
focused from the 10 top-cited papers (Scopus citations) and 10 randomly
selected papers in 5-year blocks.  We found that ecological
journals have changed markedly over time, specifically in their focus on
understanding interspecific trait variation. This pattern is not apparent
for animal behaviour; intra-specific and often intra-population scale of
scientific enquiry has mostly been the focus over the last four decades.
We propose that the future of behavioural ecology should emphasise a
comparative approach- spatially, temporally or taxonomically- that
systematically captures variation in key traits with broad implications
for conservation and community ecology.