Single Review on past events

Yitzchak Ben-Mocha (ZENiT Research Fellow /Biology & Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour) & Maike Woith (Biology) presented their project "GCoo-BreeD: advancing comparative research on cooperative breeding with a peer-reviewed, updatable and fair Global Cooperative Breeding Database".

Abstract:

Understanding the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding is the focus of an increasing number of comparative meta-analyses. Nevertheless, recent studies demonstrate that datasets on vertebrates include systematic methodological biases, resulting in a growing number of scholars calling for more rigorous curating work. In this talk, we will present the Cooperative Breeding Database (Co-BreeD), which covers key biological parameters of cooperative breeding birds, mammals and humans. We discuss Co-BreeD’s unique curating principles and how being a population-level, peer-reviewed and updatable database enables (i) studying intra- and inter-species variation and linking between fine-scale social and climatic parameters, (ii) accuracy and (iii) expansion with the publication of new data. We will demonstrate Co-BreeD’s potential by presenting the first results showing that female cooperation is more prevalent than commonly thought and how Co-BreeD data contradicts previous studies that are based on biased data. Finally, we will discuss how Co-BreeD facilitates the integration of under-represented groups into the cooperative breeding research community.