Extending {spatsoc} to measure intragroup social dynamics

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Beyond proximity-based social networks and home range overlap, animal telemetry data can also be used to measure intragroup social dynamics including individual position within groups, individual and group level movement directions, leadership patterns and lagged follower behaviours. We used a scoping review of literature across domains, including behavioural ecology, collective movement, and GISciences, to identify widely used metrics for measuring intragroup social dynamics that are not openly available in the R programming language. We present a case study illustrating 18 new functions for the R package {spatsoc} measuring intragroup social dynamics with animal telemetry data. The open availability of these new and flexible functions in {spatsoc} will allow researchers to easily measure intragroup social dynamics to more comprehensively measure the multifaceted animal social behaviours in their study systems. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Beyond proximity-based social networks and home range overlap, animal telemetry data can also be used to measure intragroup social dynamics including individual position within groups, individual and group level movement directions, leadership patterns and lagged follower behaviours. We used a scoping review of literature across domains, including behavioural ecology, collective movement, and GISciences, to identify widely used metrics for measuring intragroup social dynamics that are not openly available in the R programming language. We present a case study illustrating 18 new functions for the R package {spatsoc} measuring intragroup social dynamics with animal telemetry data. The open availability of these new and flexible functions in {spatsoc} will allow researchers to easily measure intragroup social dynamics to more comprehensively measure the multifaceted animal social behaviours in their study systems. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2167N Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Software Engineering R, animal social dynamics, spatiotemporal groups, social network analysis, collective movement, leader-follower, fission fusion, dominance hierarchies, animal social dynamics, behaviour, spatiotemporal groups, social network analysis, collective movement, leader-follower, fission-fusion, dominance hierarchies Published: 2026-05-01 14:28 Last Updated: 2026-05-01 14:28 CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Data and Code Availability Statement: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19712779 Language: English