**7. Acknowledgment**

Funding for this research was provided by the National Wildlife Research Center of the United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services. We would like to thank Dave Onorato and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for use of data on the Florida panther. We would like to thank Tommy King and the USDA/APHIS/WS National Wildlife Research Center Mississippi Field Station for data on American White Pelican. We would like to thank Michael Avery and the USDA/APHIS/WS National Wildlife Research Center Gainesville Field Station for data on black and turkey vultures. We would like to thank the USDA/APHIS/WS National Wildlife Research Center, Colorado State University, and the Colorado Division of Wildlife for use of black bear data.

#### **8. References**


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

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

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**13** 

*Canada* 

Trisalyn A. Nelson

*Spatial Pattern Analysis and Research Laboratory, Department of Geography, University of Victoria* 

**Quantifying Wildlife Home Range Changes** 

In wildlife research, telemetry data are often converted to home ranges. The concept of an animal's home range can be defined as the ". . . area traversed by the individual in its normal activities of food gathering, mating and caring for young" (Burt, 1943, pg. 351). The delineation and analysis of home ranges is common in wildlife research, and several reviews of home range studies exist (Harris et al., 1990; Laver & Kelly, 2008). Site fidelity (Edwards et al., 2009), population abundance (Trewhella et al., 1988), prey-predatory abundance (Village, 1982), impacts of human disturbance (Apps et al., 2004; Berland et al., 2008; Frair et al., 2008; Rushton et al., 2000; Thiel et al., 2008), feeding strategies (Hulbert et al., 1996) and ecological correlates of critical habitat (Tufto, 1996; Fisher, 2000) are examples of topics

Home ranges are typically delineated with polygons. Locations within the polygon are considered part of the animal's home range, and locations outside are not. As evidenced by the large number of home range studies, such binary approaches have been useful. However, landscape use by wildlife is spatially heterogeneous (Johnson et al., 1992; Kie et al., 2002). Edges (Yahner, 1988), disturbances (i.e., roads and forest harvesting) (Berland et al., 2008), and patch size (Kie et al., 2002) are just a few landscape features that cause heterogeneity in the geographic distribution of wildlife within home ranges. To account for spatial heterogeneity within a home range, core areas, defined as those used most frequently and likely to contain homesites, along with areas of refuge and dependable food sources (Burt, 1943) are sometimes delineated to create categories of habitat use (e.g., Samuel et al., 1985). Characterizing the spatial variation in wildlife distributions should improve our understanding of habitat use,

Arguably, the two most common approaches to demarcating a home range are the minimum convex polygon and kernel density estimation (Harris et al., 1990). The minimum convex polygon tends to overestimate home range size by including all the unused areas between outermost locations and increasing in area with large sample sizes (Börger et al., 2006a; Katajisto & Moilanen, 2006). As such, kernel density estimation is often preferred when demarcating a home range (Seaman & Powell, 1996; Marzluff et al., 2004; Börger et al., 2006a; Laver & Kelly, 2008). Although used to delineate binary home ranges, kernel density estimation generates a surface of values within the home range, which is useful for characterizing spatial variability in wildlife intensity. Kernel density surfaces are often referred to as utilization distributions as they give values that indicate higher and lower

especially in conjunction with the growing spatial extents of wildlife data sets.

**1. Introduction** 

addressed using home range as the analysis unit.

utilization of locations by individuals.

