While sociality is known to mediate territorial processes, it is less clear how sociality interacts with environmental features and neighbors’ location to influence habitat selection and behavior. Scent marking, a fundamental behavior in maintaining territories, can be utilized by receiving conspecifics to evaluate both encounter risk and competitive ability of the depositing individual or group. African wild dog packs were followed in the field across 2010-2021, where researchers recorded individual behaviors and pack composition, including scent marking behaviors. We combined this historical and unique behavioral dataset with co-occurring GPS collar data to make inferences on territorial behaviors, sociality, and habitat selection across spatial scales. We performed three analyses to determine 1) the relative probability of scent mark placement, 2) the probability of scent marking, and 3) the trade-off strategy between scent marking and hunting, as predicted by habitat, neighbors’ territories, and pack social composition. Specifically, we used resource selection function frameworks to determine how and whether conspecifics influenced habitat selection and behavior at multiple orders of selection. We found that conspecifics were influential across all three analyses, and mediated the impact of habitat on scent mark placement and probability. Scent mark placement and probability were both influenced by the social composition of packs, specifically pup presence, pack size, and number of overlapping neighbors, while pack size and pack experience influenced territorial maintenance strategy. Our findings demonstrate the importance of social structure across scales of territorial processes, from larger-scale habitat selection to the probability of a behavior. We demonstrate how key behavioral theories underpinning territoriality function at the scale of habitat selection and behavioral decision-making in a free-ranging, large carnivore. Future research should continue to incorporate sociality in understanding the habitat selection of animals.

1. While territoriality is one of the key mechanisms influencing carnivore space use, most studies quantify resource selection and movement in the absence of conspecific influence or territorial structure without inference on resource selection processes. 2. Our analysis incorporated intra-specific competition in a resource selection framework, via territorial data of conspecifics, to investigate mechanisms of territoriality and to better understand the role of neighboring packs on African wild dog habitat selection. We fit integrated step selection functions to 3-hour GPS data from 12 collared wild dog packs in the Okavango Delta, and estimated selection coefficients using a conditional Poisson likelihood with random effects. 3. Packs selected for the outline of their neighbors’ 30-day boundary (defined as their 90% kernel density estimate), and for the outline of their own 90-day core (defined as their 50% kernel density estimate). Neighbors’ 30-day boundary had a greater influence on resource selection than any habitat feature. Habitat selection differed when they were within versus beyond their neighbors’ 30-day boundary. 4. Pack size, pack age, pup presence, and seasonality all mediated how packs responded to neighbors, and seasonal dynamics altered the strength of residency. While newly-formed packs and packs with pups avoided their neighbors’ boundary, older packs and those without pups selected for it. Packs also selected for the boundary of larger neighboring packs more strongly than that of smaller ones. 5. Social structure within packs has implications for how they interact with conspecifics, and therefore how they are distributed across the landscape. Future research should continue to investigate how territorial processes are mediated by social dynamics and, in turn, how territorial structure mediates resource selection and movement. These results could inform the development of a human-wildlife conflict (HWC) mitigation tool by co-opting the mechanisms of conspecific interactions to manage space use of endangered carnivores.