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

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. By contrast, recent immigrants were spatially partitioned
from locally born individuals, suggesting differential dispersal
strategies by phenotype. 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.