NSF-BSF: Uncovering how links between social and spatial interactions affect ecological processes

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Understanding how societies form and operate requires the processes that shape social interactions to be uncovered. Interactions occur in many different situations, for example, individuals can be in physical proximity, have negative, or positive interactions, etc. Each of these situations provides a different contribution to the structure of a society, yet often such situations are studied separately. Furthermore, physical constraints, such as geographical barriers and man-made structures can impact who interacts with whom. Such physical features are seldom considered when examining social interactions. This work will develop tools to integrate different social situations and physical constraints into a single framework, allowing us to uncover the causes and consequences of social interactions. The researchers will implement these new tools to study how social and physical features impact disease dynamics in griffon vultures. In the study population nearly every individual can be monitored to obtain information on their movements and social interactions. The investigators will make new tools widely available to the general public and the scientific community. This study system has conservation importance because vultures are an umbrella species that provide ecosystem services (e.g., sanitation), and thus have financial and public health implications. A wildlife tracking app will be developed to alert wildlife managers when tagged animals perform unexpected behavior. Such a tool can be used in any system in which wildlife can be tracked remotely. Thus, this work will have both conservation implications and will develop analysis tools that will define how scientists social interactions, including those of humans.Animals interact with their physical and social environments in ways that impact their fitness. Social animals can benefit from associating with conspecifics to gain knowledge about the location, availability, and quality of resources. Furthermore, the physical environment influences animal movements and therefore their social interactions. To integrate social and spatial processes and uncover their feedbacks and consequences, this work will develop a novel conceptual framework based on recent developments in multilayer network analysis. Researchers will implement new methods to study the Israeli population of griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus) which is heavily managed, here most individuals in the population can be tagged and tracked. Using remote tracking that combines GPS and accelerometers, experimental manipulations, and behavioral observations, this research will study the links between the social and spatial networks of griffons and their joint impacts on disease dynamics in the population. First, research will uncover the role of different social situations in the global social structure. Next, research will examine the relationship between social interactions and the connectivity of spatial features to determine if interactions are the result of spatial constraints on proximity and/or social preferences. Finally, research will determine the effect of the relationship between social and spatial interactions on disease dynamics – a population level process. This work will combine high resolution animal tracking with large scale field based experimental manipulations and novel analytic developments in network science. Researcher here will create the foundations for integrating new analytic tools to investigate how social and ecological processes interact to shape sociality.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.