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). Combin..., Study subjects and the social landscape: The five individuals considered in this study belong to a large elephant subpopulation residing in the northeastern region of Etosha National Park, Namibia. As a part of a different research effort, these individuals were classified into several age, dominance, social, and reproductive categories (O’Connell-Rodwell et al. 2011; O’Connell et al. 2024a). The age structure in this population was determined on the basis of several morphological features and can be found in the original publication (O’Connell-Rodwell et al. 2011; O’Connell et al. 2022).  The dominance categories are reported from a population-level, ordinal dominance hierarchy based on the frequency of agonistic dyadic interactions (i.e., displacement) observed during all-occurrence sampling, over multiple field seasons (O’Connell-Rodwell et al. 2024a). The social categories were approximated using social network analysis (i.e., eigenvector centrality—an index expressing how influenti..., , # Data package for evaluating the interplay of physical and social drivers of movement in male African savanna elephants

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4qrfj6qm3 ](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4qrfj6qm3)

## Description of the data and file structure

**READ ME  TEXT FILE for BEHECO-2023-0350.R2 (**[https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arae091)](https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arae091)

This data package is associated with the manuscript BEHECO-2023-0350.R2, titled *Interplay of physical and social drivers of movement in male African savanna elephants.*\" 

The code in CodeDemo.nb (a.k.a. 'working' notebook), written in Wolfram language, uses functions from a separate code package, Movement.wl, also provided. The CodeDemo notebook demonstrates how these functions were applied to the elephant movement and physical landscape data. Both Movement.wl and the various input files (see below) are assumed to reside in the same directory as CodeDemo.nb. The.

The elephant movement data are not provided...