Quinn Webber, Gregory Albery, Damien R. Farine, Noa Pinter-Wollman, Nitika Sharma, Orr Spiegel, Eric Vander Wal, Kezia Manlove

Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal’s biology, and the social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. Behavioural variation at the “spatial-social interface”, which we define as the intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals’ phenotypes and environments, has implications for ecological and evolutionary processes including pathogen transmission, population dynamics, and the evolution of social systems. Traditionally, the spatial and social dimensions of animal biology have been studied separately despite many conceptual and practical similarities. The lack of shared vocabulary or direct alignment of analogous concepts has prevented unification of social and spatial behaviour, which diminishes the potential for synthesis, reduces the power of integrated analyses, and results in missed opportunities to test both spatial and social hypotheses. We bridge the spatial-social interface by outlining a foundation of shared theory, vocabulary, and methods. We discuss the integration of spatial and social behaviour, identify shared concepts and approaches, and discuss how these concepts can be integrated to identify and test questions at the spatial-social interface.