Anthropogenic impacts at the interface of animal spatial and social behaviour

Human disturbance is contributing to widespread, global changes in the distributions and densities of wild animals. These anthropogenic impacts on wildlife arise from multiple bottom-up and top-down pathways, including habitat loss, resource provisioning, climate change, pollution, infrastructure development, hunting and our direct presence. Animal behaviour is an important mechanism linking these disturbances to population outcomes, although these behavioural pathways are often complex and can remain obscured when different aspects of behaviour are studied in isolation from one another. The spatial-social interface provides a lens for understanding how an animal's spatial and social environments interact to determine its spatial and social phenotype (i.e. measurable characteristics of an individual), and how these phenotypes interact and feed back to reshape environments. Here, we review studies of animal behaviour at the spatial-social interface to understand and predict how human disturbance affects animal movement, distribution and intraspecific interactions, with consequences for the conservation of populations and ecosystems. By understanding the spatial-social mechanisms linking human disturbance to conservation outcomes, we can better design management interventions to mitigate undesired consequences of disturbance.This article is part of the theme issue 'The spatial-social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration'.