Data from: Space use and social association in a gregarious ungulate: testing the conspecific attraction and resource dispersion hypotheses ...

• Main Authors: Peignier, Mélissa, Webber, Quinn M. R., Koen, Erin L., Laforge, Michel P., Robitaille, Alec L., Vander Wal, Eric
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2019
• Subjects: conspecific attraction hypothesis; Rangifer tarandus; Spatial Network; Home range overlap; Social network analysis; resource dispersion hypothesis
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vd7d8v6; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.vd7d8v6

Animals use a variety of proximate cues to assess habitat quality when resources vary spatiotemporally. Two nonmutually exclusive strategies to assess habitat quality involve either direct assessment of landscape features or observation of social cues from conspecifics as a form of information transfer about forage resources. The conspecific attraction hypothesis proposes that individual space use is dependent on the distribution of conspecifics rather than the location of resource patches, whereas the resource dispersion hypothesis proposes that individual space use and social association are driven by the abundance and distribution of resources. We tested the conspecific attraction and the resource dispersion hypotheses as two nonmutually exclusive hypotheses explaining social association and of adult female caribou (Rangifer tarandus). We used location data from GPS collars to estimate interannual site fidelity and networks representing home range overlap and social associations among individual caribou. ... : Space-use and social association in caribou data fileData used to generate linear mixed models and figures for social association networks, home range overlap networks, and home range area.final-dt-dryad.Rdsfinal-dt-site-fidelity-dryadData used for linear mixed model and figure for site fidelity in caribou. ...