Plains zebra time budgets, social behavior, and communication during the 2021-2022 Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem drought

Anthropogenically induced climate change has significantly increased the frequency of acute weather events, such as drought. As human activities amplify environmental stresses, animals may be forced to prioritize survival over behaviors less crucial to immediate fitness, such as socializing. Yet, social bonds may also buffer organisms from the deleterious effects of environmental conditions. We investigated how the highly social plains zebra (Equus quagga) modify their activity budgets, social networks, and multimodal communication during a drought. This dataset contains a) activity budget, b) steps per minute as a proxy for foraging effort, c) nearest neighbor association data, d) interaction rate, e) juvenile social interaction partner data, and f) multimodal communication data., Ethical statement
 
This study was conducted on a population of wild plains zebras living in Ol Pejeta Nature Conservancy (0°00 N, 36°56 E), in Laikipia, Kenya. All research was conducted with the permission of Ol Pejeta Nature Conservancy and the Kenyan Ministry of Wildlife (NACOSTI/P/21/11647) and was in compliance with the guidelines of the Princeton University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (1835F).
 
Study animals
 
Our sample comprised 21 focal harems with an average harem size of 5 members (2-13 individuals) (Table S1). This population has been monitored continuously since 2008, and we have pedigrees of all focal individuals. We were able to individually identify zebras based on their unique stripes. Individuals were classified into one of four age/sex classes: stallion, non-lactating female, lactating female, and juvenile (Table S2). Juveniles were defined as pre-dispersal individuals, including pre-dispersed, sexually mature males as old as 4 years (N = 4 in 2021, ..., , # Plains zebra time budgets, social behavior, and communication during the 2021-2022 Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem drought

This dataset comprises the activity budgets, social association data, social interactions, and multimodal communication of wild plains zebras(Equus quagga) collected in the summers of 2021 and 2022, during which time a severe drought was experienced in the Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem. Data were collected from videos collected during focal follows of 21 known focal harems, from which we extracted social and self-maintenance behaviors, steps-per-minute, rate of social interaction, nearest-neighbor association data, and social interactions.

Multimodal communication was coded from videos to define the full suite of visual, acoustic, tactile, and chemical signals being produced. Data were subsequently used to construct co-occurrence networks of multimodal communication.

**Description of data and file structure**

All datasets have a \"Key\" tab with definitions of the colum...