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Technique | Useful for which type of species? | Comments | Selected references |
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Direct | | | |
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Behavioral observations of known individuals | Diurnal habituated animals that can be easily observed (not cryptic species) | Potentially a “gold standard” for contact networks (multiple types of social interactions can be recorded); labor intensive | [16–19] |
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Viewpoint scanning | Visible animals active during the day; open habitat (not cryptic species) | Allows between-species observations at replicable sites; labor intensive yet incomplete observations | [20] |
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Indirect | | | |
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Biologging | Easily captured and handled individuals | Population needs to be saturated with detectors; excellent resolution of proximity data although proximity does not mean contact; continuous time record; cannot distinguish between types of close contacts (e.g., fighting versus mating) | [21] |
Biologging: animal-borne acoustic proximity receiver | Marine mammals | Need to handle animal to retrieve device; good between-animal resolution | [22] |
Biologging: PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags | Useful for small mammals | Good data on duration of presence/absence of marked individuals at specific places (e.g., supplemented foraging sites) equipped with PIT loggers; approximation of contacts | [23] |
Biologging: proximity data loggers/collars | Medium to large animals | measure frequency and duration of contact; complete temporal data; need to recover loggers | [24–26] |
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Capture-mark-recapture | Easily captured and handled individuals | A contact is defined as occupying same area during same period of time; good for capturing movement/dispersal data, not good at capturing within-group contacts | [27–31] |
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Direct manipulation | Captive populations of common animals | Great for repeatable experiments on experimentally infected individuals to measure transmission, but does this reflect contact patterns in wild? | [32, 33] |
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GPS recorders | Easily captured and handled medium to large individuals | Need recorders on all individuals in select area; if recorders are synced well, excellect contact data for the time the GPS takes point (with spotty coverage in between). Maybe local avoidance happens but would be undetected? | [15] |
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Powder marking | Easily trapped and handled individuals | Gives good contact data if contacts involve direct phyical contact; can only monitor a few indivuals at a time due to contstraints on the number of powder colors | [23] |
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Radio telemetry | Handled individuals, not good for very small individuals | Contact defined as occupying same area during same period of time. Good indicator of (i) scale of interaction but gives coarse resolution of a “contact”, (ii) mixing between groups of animals, but not within groups and (iii) den-sharing contacts. Presence of fieldworkers may alter behavior. | [27, 34–36] |
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Trapping and bait marking | Easily trapped and handled individuals who use latrines to mark territories | Good data on home range overlap and intergroup movement rates | [37] |
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Video tracking from animal’s perspective | Animal must be able to be caught and wear something like a video backpack | Great contact data from individual perspective | [38] |
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Video trapping from fixed perspective (automated) | Social insects that can be individually tagged and the group monitored | Great resolution of contact data; software records duration and frequency of contacts | [39] |
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