Resolving the drivers of variation in cooperative social groups along environmental gradients

人们认为环境变化会影响自然界中合作性社会群体的进化，但原因并不总是很清楚。在某些物种中，社会群体可以帮助个体缓冲环境挑战的影响，而其他群体的形成可能是因为良性环境允许个体在有足够资源的情况下相互容忍。该项目利用澳大利亚鸟类跨环境梯度社会群体的物种内变异来更好地理解环境与社会群体之间的关系，以及这些关系中物种之间的差异与它们潜在的合作社会行为之间的关系。通过整合理论、公民科学和详细的实地实验，该项目将揭示一些物种如何以及为什么通过群体相互帮助来应对环境挑战，而另一些物种通过将这些群体分开来应对同样的挑战。该项目将利用社交媒体平台吸引参与者，解决他们的问题并分享研究成果。这将允许参与者直接参与未来研究的方向，这是将参与公民科学项目的经验与学习联系起来的关键途径。此外，通过与Galactic Polymath Education Studio的合作，本研究产生的数据将用于K-12教室，通过将性状变异与环境和地理空间联系起来，帮助学生理解与生物学相关及以外的主题。该项目开发了一种生态地理学方法，以了解跨环境梯度的合作社会群体结构中产生物种内和物种间变化的过程。这种跨两个生物组织层次的生态地理模式的整合将提供关于合作群体如何进化的新信息。这种方法可以同时解决社会系统是否对环境梯度做出反应，以及为什么物种之间的反应可能不同。这将通过三个目标来实现：1)建立一个理论框架，以理解环境对社会动态的影响如何在不同的环境梯度中产生群体结构的变化；2)通过使用澳大利亚细尾鹩莺（Aves, Maluridae）的跨大陆公民科学数据集，研究几个物种的社会群体规模的生态地理格局；3)通过对两个特定物种的观察和实验研究，明确地将不同的变异模式与适应性和行为的变化联系起来。这项工作将扩展关于群体冲突的社会进化理论，以预测群体规模和行为沿环境梯度的后果。此外，使用社会系统中物种内变化的公民科学数据将解决诸如温度、降雨或土地利用等相互作用因素如何解耦环境-群体大小变化模式。最后，计划中的实地实验将允许测试社会冲突在产生这种模式中的作用。这种整合种内和种间格局的方法将有助于生态地理学理论的进一步发展。该项目由行为系统集群（BSC）和促进竞争研究的既定计划（EPSCoR）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Environmental variation is thought to affect the evolution of cooperative social groups in nature, but it is not always clear why. Social groups may help individuals buffer the effects of environmental challenges in some species, while other groups may form because benign environments allow individuals to tolerate each other when there are enough resources to go around. This project makes use of within-species variation in social groups of Australian birds across environmental gradients to better understand the relationship between environment and social groups, and how differences between species in these relationships relate to their underlying cooperative social behavior. By integrating theory, citizen science, and detailed field experiments, this project will reveal how and why some species confront environmental challenges by helping each other in groups, while other species confront the same challenges by breaking those groups apart. The project will use social media platforms to engage participants, addressing their questions and sharing research outcomes. This will allow participants to be directly involved in the direction of future research, a key way to link the experience of participating in citizen science projects with learning. Further, the data generated from this study will be used in K-12 classrooms to help students understand topics both related to and beyond biology by linking trait variation to the environment and geographic space through a partnership with Galactic Polymath Education Studio.This project develops an ecogeographic approach to understand the processes that generate within- and across-species variation in structure of cooperative social groups across environmental gradients. Such an integration of ecogeographic patterns across two levels of biological organization will provide new information about how cooperative groups evolve. This approach can simultaneously address whether social systems respond to environmental gradients and why species may respond differently from one another. This will be accomplished through three aims: 1) developing a theoretical framework for understanding how environmental effects on social dynamics may generate variation in group structure across environmental gradients, 2) examining ecogeographic patterns in social groups size across several species through the use a cross-continental citizen science dataset on Australian fairywrens (Aves, Maluridae), and 3) explicitly linking disparate patterns of variation to changes in fitness and behavior through observational and experimental studies in two specific species . This work will extend social evolution theory on group conflict to predict the consequences for group size and behavior along environmental gradients. Additionally, use of citizen science data on within-species variation in social systems will address how interacting factors, such as temperature, rainfall, or land use might decouple patterns of environment-group size variation. Finally planned field experiments will allow the testing of the role of social conflict in generating such patterns. This proposed method of integrating intraspecific and interspecific patterns will contribute to further development of ecogeographic theory generally. This project is jointly funded by the Behavioral Systems Cluster (BSC) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.