ACDB

What it does

Socially transmitted behaviors, vocal dialects, migration routes, tool-use preferences, foraging traditions, are widespread across the animal kingdom, but until now there hasn't been a comprehensive, comparative dataset documenting where they occur or how widely they're distributed. The ACDB synthesizes data from a systematic review of the published literature on animal culture and social learning, currently covering 128 behaviors across 61 species, including vocal communication, migration, predator defense, foraging, habitat alteration, play, and mating displays.

The database is structured relationally across four linked tables: species (taxonomic and social structure data), groups (location, size, and social position within a species), behaviors (descriptions, transmission mode, and effects from human activity when known), and sources (the primary literature behind every entry). Taxonomic names are matched against the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy for interoperability with other datasets, and each species carries its IUCN Red List status as a proxy for extinction risk. The goal is to help researchers, educators, and conservationists ask questions that need comparative data across taxa, how widely cultural behaviors are distributed across the animal tree of life, and how behavioral flexibility relates to a species' resilience to human-driven environmental change.