A home range is the area an individual animal regularly uses during its activities over a specified period, for example finding food, resting and reproducing. It describes space use; a territory adds the behavioural question of which area the animal defends.
Animal radiotelemetry can supply a sequence of locations from a transmitter carried by the animal. A 2011 study combined location tracking and collar activity sensors to compare owned and unowned free-roaming domestic cats. Measuring location and activity together linked the spatial pattern to behaviour rather than treating every recorded point as equivalent.[ref]
Home Range, Habitat Use, and Activity Patterns of Free-Roaming Domestic Cats by Jeff A. Horn and others. Abstract and Introduction; radio-telemetry and collar activity measurements
A boundary depends on the observation period and the method used to summarize positions. In an invented example, of recorded positions fall in one region and five are distant excursions. That region contains of these observations; this alone does not prove that the animal spends of all future time there. Unequal sampling and serially related locations matter. A utilization distribution instead describes how use varies across space, connecting a range outline with the frequency of use within it.
New to topics? Read the docs here!