Abstract
Home range (HR) studies are a particularly common approach to investigations of animal habitat use, resource availability, and response to management manipulation such as relocations. Terrapene carolina (Eastern box turtle) and its sister taxon T. ornata (Ornate box turtle) are especially popular subjects of HR studies because they are relatively easily tracked. Terrapene HR studies have revealed a wide variation in HR sizes within and between populations, due to factors such as differences in ecoregion and analytical approach (e.g., minimum convex polygons, kernel analysis, bivariate normal, multivariate Ornstein–Uhlenbeck stochastic process, harmonic means). We performed a meta-analysis of the available literature, including unpublished work to avoid bias due to under-publication, to explore the causes for variation in HR size. We found 19 studies reporting T. carolina HR sizes and seven studies reporting T. ornata HR sizes; the resulting meta-analysis revealed patterns that are not visible in the individual studies. We found important differences between the species: female T. ornata had smaller HRs than males, whereas the opposite is true for T. carolina, and T. ornata HRs were influenced by ecoregion, while T. carolina HRs were not similarly influenced. Not surprisingly, we found that choice of analysis technique affected HR estimate; analyses using ellipses resulted in larger HR estimates than all the other techniques, while kernels were smaller than minimum convex polygons. Although not indicated by individual studies, our meta-analysis showed that the HRs of relocated T. carolina females were significantly larger than those of non-relocated females. Although the number of individual turtles in studies varied from three to 25, the sample size did not significantly affect HR size.
Highlights
Home range (HR) studies have a long, complex, and contentious history, in part because the concept of home range is attractive yet ambiguous
We found 23 publications that reported T. carolina HR estimates, and eight publications that reported T. ornata HR estimates
All the studies that met our criteria for HR mean, variance, and sample size, or the data for which these could be calculated, used radio telemetry as their tracking technique
Summary
Home range (HR) studies have a long, complex, and contentious history, in part because the concept of home range is attractive yet ambiguous. One of the earliest HR studies defined HR as “the area an individual uses to carry out its life functions” (e.g., feeding, mating, overwintering, etc.) [1]. This broad definition, along with the lack of a generally accepted subsequent narrowing of this definition, has led to a wide range of uses for the term HR, which is reflected in the varied methods that are used for calculating home ranges. Some studies attempt to include all the Diversity 2019, 11, 68; doi:10.3390/d11050068 www.mdpi.com/journal/diversity. Diversity 2019, 11, 68 normal activities that subject animals perform in an annual cycle (e.g., [4,5]), while others explicitly integrate activities such as nesting forays [6].
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