Project description
Climate can impact cooperation in animals
Climate factors, such as aridity, influence social behaviour in mammals, birds, and insects. While understanding responses to climate change is crucial, there is a need for additional research across different climates. The ERC-funded SOCIALEARTH project aims to explore how climate impacts cooperation across a vast geographical scale. It will conduct behavioural experiments with thousands of wasps across Africa, and combine advanced modelling and global meta-analyses. This initiative represents the largest within-species experimental study of animal social behaviour to date. The project will investigate which climatic conditions promote cooperation, help ensure its stability, and foster closer collaboration, pioneering a new climate-focused approach to understanding cooperation in the wild.
Objective
Understanding how cooperation evolves is a major cross-disciplinary research ambition. Recently, in biology, a new picture of cooperation has begun to come into focus, due to a series of global analyses collating decades of natural history observations across animals. Excitingly, in mammals, birds, and insects, global mapping projects have revealed that the distribution of animal cooperation is linked to climatic factors, including aridity and unpredictable rainfall. These findings have established a new frontier: to understand how cooperation evolves – and how the world’s social animals will react to climate change – we need to understand why climate matters. However, almost all work in this area has been based on between-species correlations gleaned from the literature. There is an urgent need for ambitious within-species experimental studies of cooperation across climates, revealing causal effects. SOCIALEARTH will address this gap, illuminating how climate shapes cooperation at a trailblazing geographical scale.
SOCIALEARTH combines within-species behavioural experiments involving thousands of wasps across Africa, cutting-edge modelling, and global meta-analyses. The result will form the geographically-largest within-species experimental study of animal social behaviour ever attempted, spanning 3,000 miles across Africa, from rainforests to savannas, grasslands, and deserts. Across the continent, I have established collaborations, pilot studies, field-sites, permits, and genomic resources, and I am therefore uniquely placed to pursue a feasible study at a continental scale for the first time.
SOCIALEARTH tackles three objectives. Which climates trigger cooperation? Which climates ensure cooperation is stable? Which climates fuel tighter cooperation? Each will be tackled by combining within-species fieldwork across climatic gradients, comparative analysis, and evolutionary theory – in the vanguard of a new climate-focused vision of cooperation in the wild.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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- natural sciences biological sciences zoology mammalogy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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BS8 1QU BRISTOL
United Kingdom
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