Ecological Conditions and Association Patterns
Neither rainfall, nor young leaf availability were strongly associated network measures, either at the network level or the node level (Tables 1 & 2; Fig. 3). However, association patterns did correlate with fruit availability. At the network level, fruit availability was weakly but positively associated with both network density and clustering coefficient (Table 1; Fig. 3). At the node-level, fruit availability showed a strong positive relationship with both strength and degree (Table 2); Fig. 3). Thus, core units are more likely to associate with one another, and to form larger aggregations when fruits are abundant, but decrease associations when fruit is scarce (Fig. 3a).
Table 1. Impact that ecological variables (i.e., food availability and rainfall) had on social network measures (i.e., density and clustering coefficient) of Colobus angolensis ruwenzorii core units at Nabugabo, Uganda at the network level from Aug. 2017 to May 2019. Note that in the model, all ecological variables were scaled.