Home range (source code)

= Home range

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.<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]{ref}

A boundary depends on the observation period and the method used to summarize positions. In an invented example, $95$ of $100$ recorded positions fall in one region and five are distant excursions. That region contains $95\%$ of these observations; this alone does not prove that the animal spends $95\%$ 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.