Part B: Data Analysis II

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9. HOME RANGES

Before constructing home ranges you have to consider two things: scale and stationarity. For example, are you looking to construct home ranges for summer and winter seasons, or are you looking to construct migratory corridors? Do you have years of data to construct a home range proper, or is it a subset of the true home range that you're wanting to map? It may be the case that:

• you have to segment the track first and determine separate home ranges
• you're delineating movement corridors rather than home ranges
• home ranges are not appropriate.

See: Benhamou 2014 Of scales and stationarity in animal movements

Next, construct/delineate areas of higher relative use, which may be measured in one of three ways:

• overall (utilization distribution; UD)
• time spent (intensive distribution; ID)
• number of visits (recursive distribution; RD)

The tools/analyses available to construct home ranges depend on your data and whether or not they are serially autocorrelated. 

Independent data: MCP / kernel density in ArcView

Independent data and a boundary: LoCoH in R
References: Getz et al 2007 LoCoH: Nonparameteric Kernel Methods for Constructing Home Ranges and Utilization Distributions)

Serial autocorrelated data (with/without a boundary): MKDE/BRB in Pascal, Windows .exe (preferred options) or adeHabitatHR in R

References: see many papers by Simon Benhamou on his website

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