Abstract
Human activities impact the distribution of numerous species. Anthropogenic habitats are often fragmented, and wildlife must navigate through human-influenced and ‘natural’ parts of the landscape to access resources. Different methods to determine the home-range areas of nonhuman primates have not considered the additional complexities of ranging in anthropogenic areas. Here, using 6 months of spatial data on the distribution of chimpanzee presence (feces, feeding traces, nests, opportunistic encounters; n = 833) collected across the wet and dry seasons, we examine different analytical techniques to calculate the home-range size of an unhabituated chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) community inhabiting a forest–farm mosaic at Madina, Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau. The minimum convex polygon method and the grid cell (500 m × 500 m cell size) method estimated the chimpanzees home-range size at 19.02 and 15.50 km2, respectively with kernel analysis calculating a lower value of 8.52 km2. For the grid cell method, home-range estimates varied with cell size, with larger cells producing larger estimates. We compare our home-range estimates with other chimpanzee research sites across Africa. We recommend the use of kernel analysis for determining primate home ranges, especially for those groups exploiting fragmented habitats including forest–farm mosaics, as this method takes account of inaccessible or infrequently used anthropogenic areas across the complete home range of the primate group. However, care must be taken when using this method, since it is sensitive to small sample sizes that can occur when studying unhabituated communities, resulting in underestimated home ranges.
Highlights
An animal’s home range is an area used to forage for food, search for mating partners, and raise offspring (Burt 1943)
We found 833 chimpanzee traces across the study area in both natural and anthropogenic habitats
Kernel analysis more clearly demonstrates the use of habitat fragments by chimpanzees at a finer scale than the other two methods
Summary
An animal’s home range is an area used to forage for food, search for mating partners, and raise offspring (Burt 1943). Home-range sizes can fluctuate over time (seasonally or yearly) depending on environmental conditions (e.g., climate) and habitat type, among other things (Newton-Fisher 2003; Wingfield 2005). Home-range size can be influenced by anthropogenic changes to the environment and human presence. The abundance of food items in certain anthropogenic landscapes (e.g., urban or agricultural habitats) has led to some species reducing their home ranges due to high resource abundance and lack of natural competitors [e.g., raccoon (Procyon lotor): Prage et al (2004); Badger (Meles meles): Šálek et al (2015)]. Some anthropogenic disturbance factors (e.g., commercial logging and road networks) reduce natural food availability and drive some species to increase their home range to meet their nutritional needs [e.g., woodland caribou
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