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Dryad

Literature review on the effect of conspecific density on animal dispersal (2000-2023)

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Apr 22, 2024 version files 20.29 KB

Abstract

We review empirical studies of animal dispersal in relation to conspecific density to examine the evidence for density-dependent dispersal among taxa and test whether reports of its occurrence are taxon-specific and/or biased by the methodology employed. We conducted a thorough review of the literature (2000 - 2023) and found k = 97 empirical studies of amphibians, birds, fishes, invertebrates, mammals, or reptiles that had tested for a correlation between conspecific density and animal dispersal. From each, we derived the correlation coefficient of the relationship between density and dispersal, which we z-transformed to obtain the effect size, Zr. We also extracted and compiled information on taxonomic group, sex, age, migratory behavior, experimental setup, dispersal metric, density metric, and variable type, as well as temporal and spatial scale to test their relationships with Zr using linear regressions and multilevel mixed-effect modeling.