Social information use for decision-making is common and affects ecological and evolutionary processes, including social aggregation, species coexistence and cultural evolution. Despite increasing ecological knowledge on social information use, very little is known about its genetic basis and therefore its evolutionary potential. Genetic variation in a trait affecting an individual's social and non-social environment may have important implications for population dynamics, interspecific interactions and for expression of other, environmentally plastic traits. We estimated repeatability, additive genetic variance and heritability of the use of conspecific and heterospecific social cues (abundance and breeding success) for breeding site choice in a population of wild collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis. Repeatability was found for two social cues: previous year conspecific breeding success and previous year heterospecific abundance. Yet, additive genetic variances for these two social cues, and thus heritabilities, were low. This suggests that most of the phenotypic variation in the use of social cues and resulting conspecific and heterospecific social environment experienced by individuals in this population stems from phenotypic plasticity. Given the important role of social information use on ecological and evolutionary processes, more studies on genetic versus environmental determinism of social information use are needed.

The dataset was collected by following collared flycatchers and great tits breeding in nest boxes on Gotland, Sweden. The field data has been further prepared for the uploaded form as described in the Data preparation section and online supporting information of the related paper (Tolvanen et al. 2020 Quantitative genetics of the use of conspecific and heterospecific social cues for breeding site choice, Evolution).

The pedigree data ("Pedigree.csv") contains pruned pedigree specific for the phenotypic data set used.

The phenotypic data ("PhenoData.csv") contains the response variables in the first five columns (note that some contain missing values), followed by the fixed and random effect variables used in the analyses.