On assessing the importance of demographic change for social structure: a comment on Shizuka and Johnson

Abstract

The review by Shizuka and Johnson (2019) on “How demographic processes shape animal social networks” identifies an important overlooked fact that demographic changes associated with death, emigration, or immigration can perturb social systems by disrupting existing social relationships. Since social networks have become a powerful way of quantitatively characterizing social relationship using various social metrics such as degree, weighted degree, betweenness, and cliquishness (cluster coefficient), the authors argue that the typologies created by these graphs and their associated metrics can provide insights into not only the direct consequences of demographic changes, but also the indirect ones that occur via rewiring.