**6. Conclusions**

Our goal was to assist researchers in determining the appropriate methods to assess size and shape of home range with a variety of species and movement vectors. Although we did not set out to assess the accuracy of methods, our results suggested that BBMM and hplug-in are

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more appropriate for today's GPS datasets that can have >1,000 locations seasonally and up to 10,000 locations annually over a 2–3 year collection period. Of equal importance, we were not able to generate KDE with hlscv in Home Range Tools for ArcMap and, to our knowledge, no other software was suitable or reported to determine size of home range for both KDE with hplug-in and BBMM other than R. The next step of research should focus on alternate software that can be used to estimate size of home range with actual animal GPS datasets. Although all software would likely produce inconsistent home range sizes as previously indicated for earlier programs with VHF datasets (Lawson & Rodgers 1997; Mitchell 2006), the magnitude and reason for differences needs to be understood. Finally, continued assessment of accuracy of estimates of home range is necessary with simulated datasets that range from several thousand to 10,000 serial locations that have defined true utilization distributions to determine proper estimator for size of home range based on study objectives and to verify software reliability.

Further assessment of third generation methods (i.e. mechanistic home-range models, movement-based kernel density estimators) and development of user-friendly packages would be beneficial. As most third generation methods are in their infancy stages of development and evaluation, we are confident that home range estimation will continue to grow and evolve to offer researchers multiple choices for each study species. Undoubtedly, the debate over the proper technique to use should continue but we caution that ecology of the study animal, research objectives, software limitations, and home range estimators should be critically evaluated from the inception of a study (i.e. prior to ordering of GPS technology) to final estimation of size of home range.
