Simulated poaching affects global connectivity and efficiency in social networks of African savanna elephants—An exemplar of how human disturbance impacts group-living species
Fig 2
Flow chart summarizing the process of simulating social networks among virtual elephant populations.
At initialization, the probabilities of association within and between groups are set according to kinship and age category (Fig 1B). At the beginning of each time step, the set probability of association within each group or between each set of groups, and between each dyad, is compared to a randomly generated number (RDN) between {0,1}. If this probability is greater than RDN, the association is set to occur. If this probability is lower than RDN, the association does not occur, and the time step is terminated. At the end of each time step the number of times a specific dyad has formed across all previous time steps is updated (i.e., increased by one if the association had occurred, or remained the same otherwise).