DOI: 10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj773
title: Behaviour across time and space–how large scale ‘trait-based’ approaches can shape behavioural ecology

description: Understanding the responses of organisms to environmental change is
 critical to tackling the grand challenges of 21st century biology. Fields
 such as environmental physiology and ecology have embraced these
 challenges by shifting the scale of scientific enquiry and utilising
 large-scale comparative approaches. Behavioural research has not yet
 realised this potential to the same extent. We argue that adopting a
 trait-based approach at spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales for
 behavioural ecology can advance the field and address emerging questions
 in biology. We surveyed the literature in the well-known and long running
 behaviour journals (Animal Behaviour, Behavioural Ecology and Behavioural
 Ecology and Sociobiology), and ecology journals (Ecology, Journal of
 Ecology and Oecologia) between 1981 and 2020 (1990-2020 for Behavioral
 Ecology, which has only been in publication since 1990). We extracted
 metadata on citation numbers, and whether the artcle have multispecies and
 multi populations approach, and whether the artcle were animal or plant
 focused from the 10 top-cited papers (Scopus citations) and 10 randomly
 selected papers in 5-year blocks.  We found that ecological
 journals have changed markedly over time, specifically in their focus on
 understanding interspecific trait variation. This pattern is not apparent
 for animal behaviour; intra-specific and often intra-population scale of
 scientific enquiry has mostly been the focus over the last four decades.
 We propose that the future of behavioural ecology should emphasise a
 comparative approach- spatially, temporally or taxonomically- that
 systematically captures variation in key traits with broad implications
 for conservation and community ecology.
description: # Behaviour across time and space–how large scale ‘trait-based’ approaches
 can shape behavioural ecology Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj773](10.5061/dryad.f4qrfj773) ## Description of the
 data and file structure The data file contains data of selected articles
 from well-known and long running behaviour journals (Animal Behaviour,
 Behavioural Ecology and Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology), and ecology
 journals (Ecology, Journal of Ecology and Oecologia). The 10 top-cited
 papers (Scopus citations) and 10 randomly selected papers in 5-year blocks
 between the years 1981-2020 (1990-2020 for Behavioral Ecology, which has
 only been in publication since 1990). Dataset contains four .csv files,
 "randomecology.csv" and "topecology.csv" files contain
 data of the ecology journals and "randombehaviour.csv" and
 "topbehaviour.csv" files contain data of the behaviour journals.
 Each data file contains article title, authors, journal name, publication
 years, number of citations, number of species and populations, and whether
 the article was plant or animal focused.  Other variable definitions: *
 *Subject* indicates whether the article belongs to behaviour or ecology
 journals. * *Time* column divided time period from 1981-2020 into five
 year period; i.e., 1 indicate time period between 1981-1985.   * *No.
 species* and * *No. population* column indicate number of species and
 number of populations studied in the article; NA in the column indicate
 cases when we could not extract the number of species and populations from
 the article. * *Level of comparison* classified
 individuals-population-species broadness approach by the following order:
  (1) within individuals, (2) within populations or between individuals,
 (3) between populations or (4) between species. * *PVA* indicates whether
 study species of the paper is animal or plant. * *multiple_sites* column
 indicates whether the study had multiple sites and  *
 *multiple_seasons* indicates whether study were conducted over multiple
 seasons; NA in the column indicates cases when we could not extract the
 relevant data from he article.