Environmental variability affects flexibility in activity onset at large geographic scales

Timing is an essential component of the phenotype, influencing organism fitness and fundamentally shaping ecological interactions. Although variation in the timing of activity can be substantial, the degree to which this variation stems from behavioral flexibility (within-individual variation) vs. consistent behavioral differences (among-individual variation) is poorly understood and represents a key knowledge gap as these have different ecological and evolutionary implications. Whereas flexibility in timing may be advantageous in novel circumstances, individuals could also make mistakes. Alternatively, consistent among-individual differences in timing may lead certain individuals to exhibit maladaptive behavior when confronting novel conditions (e.g., light pollution or novel predators). We estimated activity onset from 1050 captures of 483 individual white-footed mice, Peromyscus leucopus, across the upper Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and southern Appalachia regions of the United..., , # Environmental variability affects individual variation in activity onset at large geographic scales

## Overview

This dataset accompanies the manuscript *Environmental variability affects individual variation in activity onset at large geographic scales*. It contains two CSV files:

1. **`pele_data.csv`** — individual-level capture data for white-footed mice (*Peromyscus leucopus*) collected from March – October 2022 across 8 NEON sites across the upper Midwest, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and southern Appalachian regions of the United States as part of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) monitoring protocol (NEON Doc #: NEON.DOC.000481). NEON sites used included BLAN: Blandy Experimental Farm, Virginia, HARV: Harvard Experimental Forest & Quabbin Watershed, Massachusetts, MLBS: Mountain Lake Biological Station, Virginia, ORNL: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, SCBI: Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Virginia, SERC: Smithsonian Environmental Research Cen...,