Animal Space Use

Temporally constrained space use is a key property of animal movement. With respect to vertebrates three main statistical representations are particularly popular among modelers, based on disparate theoretical foundations. Which one should one use for analysis of a particular data set? As always in ecological research, one needs some simple protocol to distinguish between alternative model assumptions. Animals paths are neither straight lines nor a dense dot of positions from juggling back and forth at the same spot. Typically we see a complicated combination of these two extreme patterns; some quite straightforward moves occasionally abrupted by more jagged movement. In order to infer behavioural and ecological results from space use one needs to study the data in the context of a realistic theoretical framework. Outside the realm of temporal site fidelity; e.g., a drifting home range (Doncaster and Macdonald 1991), ecological textbooks typically explain the mixture of straight a