Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences, University of Idaho , Moscow, ID, USA.
Department of Biology, Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, University of Washington , Seattle, WA, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2024 Oct 21;379(1912):20220523. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0523. Epub 2024 Sep 4.
Animals simultaneously navigate spatial and social environments, and their decision-making with respect to those environments constitutes their spatial (e.g. habitat selection) and social (e.g. conspecific associations) phenotypes. The spatial-social interface is a recently introduced conceptual framework linking these components of spatial and social ecology. The spatial-social interface is inherently scale-dependent, yet it has not been integrated with the rich body of literature on ecological scale. Here, we develop a conceptual connection between the spatial-social interface and ecological scale. We propose three key innovations that incrementally build upon each other. First, the use-availability framework that underpins a large body of literature in behavioural ecology can be used in analogy to the phenotype-environment nomenclature and is transferable across the spatial and social realms. Second, both spatial and social phenotypes are hierarchical, with nested components that are linked via constraints-from the top down-or emergent properties-from the bottom up. Finally, in both the spatial and social realms, the definitions of environment and phenotype depend on the focal scale of inquiry. These conceptual innovations cast our understanding of the relationships between social and spatial dimensions of animal ecology in a new light, allowing a more holistic understanding and clearer hypothesis development for animal behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue 'The spatial-social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration'.
动物同时在空间和社会环境中导航，它们在这些环境中的决策构成了它们的空间（例如，栖息地选择）和社会（例如，同种个体的关联）表现型。空间-社会界面是一个最近引入的概念框架，将空间和社会生态学的这些组成部分联系起来。空间-社会界面本质上是依赖于尺度的，但它尚未与关于生态尺度的丰富文献相结合。在这里，我们在空间-社会界面和生态尺度之间建立了概念联系。我们提出了三个关键的创新点，它们相互递进。首先，行为生态学中大量文献所基于的使用-可利用性框架可以类比于表现型-环境命名法，并可以在空间和社会领域中转移。其次，空间和社会表现型都是分层的，具有嵌套的组成部分，这些组成部分通过约束（自上而下）或涌现的属性（自下而上）相互连接。最后，在空间和社会领域中，环境和表现型的定义取决于调查的焦点尺度。这些概念上的创新以新的视角塑造了我们对动物生态学中社会和空间维度之间关系的理解，为动物行为提供了更全面的理解和更清晰的假说发展。本文是主题为“空间-社会界面：理论和经验综合”的一部分。
