Leveraging long-term data to investigate ecological drivers of individual and collective behaviour in wild primate groups

The behavioural ecologist and biological anthropologist, Urs Kalbitzer, is setting up a database with long-term behavioural and ecological data from a social primate, the red colobus. He says: “The database will be essential for the efficient investigation of the behavioural ecology and collective behaviour of this, and potentially other, social primate species in Kibale National Park, Uganda.” Within the project Leveraging long-term data to investigate ecological drivers of individual and collective behaviour in wild primate groups Kalbitzer will transfer the data into a custom-made, easily-accessible database on GitHub. “This will significantly facilitate future projects on collective movement, foraging decisions, and social behaviour of red colobus and other primates in their natural environment in Kibale”, says Kalbitzer. In addition to the database construction, Martin Golooba, from Makerere University in Uganda, has started data collection in the field in Kibale to extend the database. However, this work is just getting started with the aim of collaborating with researchers from different disciplines such as computer science, nutritional ecology, behavioural ecology, and psychology by addressing theoretical questions from different perspectives, and applying the appropriate methods.