Data from: Interplay of physical and social drivers of movement in male African savanna elephants

Despite extensive research into the behavioral ecology of free-ranging
animal groups, questions remain about how group members integrate
information about their physical and social surroundings. This is because
a) tracking of multiple group members is limited to a few easily
manageable species; and b) the tools to simultaneously quantify physical
and social influences on an individual’s movement remain challenging,
especially across large geographic scales. A relevant example of a
widely-ranging species with a complex social structure and of conservation
concern is the African savanna elephant. We evaluate highly synchronized
GPS tracks from five male elephants in Etosha National Park in Namibia by
incorporating their dynamic social landscape into an established resource
selection model. The fitted model predicts movement patterns based
simultaneously on the physical landscape (e.g., repeated visitation of
waterholes) and the social landscape (e.g., avoidance of a dominant male).
Combining the fitted models for multiple focal individuals produces
landscape-dependent social networks that vary over space (e.g., with
distance from a waterhole) and time (e.g., as the seasons change). The
networks, especially around waterholes, are consistent with dominance
patterns determined from previous behavioral studies.  Models
that combine physical landscape and social effects based on remote
tracking can augment traditional methods for determining social structure
from intensive behavioral observations. More broadly, these models will be
essential to effective, in-situ conservation and management of
wide-ranging social species in the face of anthropogenic disruptions to
their physical surroundings and social connections.