Nitika Sharma

Interests

No activities entered.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Journals/Publications

• Sharma, N. (2023). Spatial organization of collective food distribution in a paper wasp society. BioArxiv.
• Sharma, N. (2022). A reproductive heir has a central position in multilayer social networks of paper wasps. Animal Behaviour.
• Sharma, N. (2022). Queen succession in the Indian paper wasp Ropalidia marginata: On the trail of the potential queen. Journal of Biosciences.
• Sharma, N. (2023). Behavioural ecology at the spatial-social interface. Biological Reviews.
  More info

  Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal’s biology, and the social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. Behavioural variation at the “spatial-social interface”, which we define as the intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals’ phenotypes and environments, has implications for ecological and evolutionary processes including pathogen transmission, population dynamics, and the evolution of social systems. Traditionally, the spatial and social dimensions of animal biology have been studied separately despite many conceptual and practical similarities. The lack of shared vocabulary or direct alignment of analogous concepts has prevented unification of social and spatial behaviour, which diminishes the potential for synthesis, reduces the power of integrated analyses, and results in missed opportunities to test both spatial and social hypotheses. We bridge the spatial-social interface by outlining a foundation of shared theory, vocabulary, and methods. We discuss the integration of spatial and social behaviour, identify shared concepts and approaches, and discuss how these concepts can be integrated to identify and test questions at the spatial-social interface.
• Sharma, N. (2023). Social situations differ in their contribution to population-level social structure in griffon vultures. Ecology and Evolution.
  More info

  Animal social relationships emerge from interactions in multiple ecological situations. However, we seldom ask how each situation contributes to the structure of a population or to the social position of individuals. Griffon vultures interact in multiple situations, including when roosting, flying, and feeding. These social interactions can influence population-level outcomes such as disease transmission and information sharing. We examined the contribution of each ecological situation to the social structure of the population and to individuals’ social positions using GPS-tracking. We found that the number of individuals each vulture interacted with was best predicted by diurnal interactions. However, the strength of social bonds was best predicted by interactions on the ground – both during the day and at night but not by interactions while flying. Thus, social situations differ in their impact on the relationships that individuals form. Given the conservation importance of vultures, these findings can inform wildlife management actions.
• Sharma, N. (2020). Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology. EcoEvoRxiv.
  More info

  Abstract Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, there is evidence that such variation may far exceed what might be produced by sampling error. This evidence comes from a growing meta-research agenda that seeks to describe and explain variation in reliability of scientific results. One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. The best evidence for this comes from a recent social science study that asked 29 different research teams to answer the same question independently by analyzing the same data set. Although many of the effect sizes were similar, some differed substantially from the average. We plan to implement an analogous study in ecology and evolutionary biology, a field in which there has been no empirical exploration of the variation in effect sizes or model predictions of dependent variables generated by analytical decisions of different researchers. We have obtained two unpublished data sets, one from evolutionary ecology and one from conservation ecology, and we will recruit as many independent scientists as possible to conduct analyses of these data to answer prespecified research questions. We will also recruit peer reviewers to rate the analyses based on their methodological descriptions so that we have multiple ratings of each analysis. Next we will quantify the variability in choices of independent variables among analyses and, using meta-analytic techniques, describe and quantify the degree of variability among effect sizes and predicted values for each of the data sets. Finally, we will quantify the extent to which deviation of individual effect sizes and predicted values from the meta-analytic mean for that data set is explained by peer review ratings and by the ‘uniqueness’ of the set of variables chosen for the analysis by each team.
• Sharma, N. (2023). Multi-Object Tracking in Heterogeneous environments (MOTHe) for animal video recordings. PeerJ.
• Sharma, N. (2019). A place for everything and everything in its place: spatial organization of individuals on nests of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
• Sharma, N. (2012). Kumar, H., Sharma, N. and Narasimmarajan, K., Socio-economic profiles and corridor mapping of two bottleneck regions lying between Rajaji and Corbett national parks, Uttarakhand, Northern India.. Cibtech Journal of Zoology.

Others

• Sharma, N. (2019, December). A place for everything and everything in its place: Spatial organization of wasps on the nests of the primitively eusocial paper wasp Ropalidia marginata. https://etd.iisc.ac.in/handle/2005/5059