Animal Space Use

The standard theories on animal space use rest on some shaky behavioural assumptions, as elaborated on in my papers, in my book and here in my blog. One of these assumptions regards the assumed lack of influence of positive feedback, in particular the self-reinforcing effect that emerge when individuals are moving around with a cognitive capacity for both temporal and spatial memory utilization. The common ecological methods to study individual habitat use; like the utilization distribution (a kernel density distribution with isopleth demarcations), use/availability analysis, and so on, explicitly build on statistical theory that not only disregards such positive feedback, but in fact requires that this emergent property is not influencing the system under scrutiny. Unfortunately, most memory-enhanced numerical models to simulate space use are rigged to comply with negative rather than positive feedback effects. For example, the model animal successively stores its local experience w