Social information use promotes breeding synchrony but constrains adaptation to rapid environmental changes

This study investigates how private sensing of ecological cues and social sensing of neighbours’ breeding states interact to shape the evolution of breeding strategy, specifically the initiation of breeding. By establish individual based simulation models (IBMs), we explore the formation of breeding phenology and population reproductive output under two separate sensing scenarios. (1) private sensing: individuals make breeding decisions based purely on independently perceived resource conditions, and (2) social sensing: individuals make decisions considering both privately perceived resource conditions and the breeding status of neighbours. Individuals make decisions about breeding or not depending on the daily conditions acting on their own behavioural reaction norm, which is an evolutionary trait inherited from the female parent. Further, we consider three scales of environmental context: (1) “homogeneous” vs “heterogeneous” landscapes: individuals sense the same resource dynamic (occurs in a peaked way) in a season in the former, and experience locally varied ones (in the peak timing) across territories in the latter. (2) “steady” vs “fluctuating” across years: simulations are run on an evolutionary time scale. The phenological dynamics are either consistent over years or show an extent of fluctuation. (3) Climate change: 150 years of climatic advances are introduced at the end of the evolutionary time scale to compare the response of breeding phenology and population reproductive output under the two sensing modes. In this dataset, we list all the simulation scripts and simulation outcomes that are used to generate all the figures presented in the study results (in both the main results and the supplementary materials). The simulation models are coded in C++ and can be directly run on Visual Studio 2022. We also include the analysis R script, which is used to generate statistical results and visualise the simulation outcomes in Figures.