Beyond the Utilization Distribution: Identifying home range areas that are intensively exploited or repeatedly visited

Abstract

The Utilization Distribution (UD) provides a useful global but static (time-integrated) representation of space use patterns of animals that perform home range behavior. To promote a more dynamic approach, we show how areas of particular interest in terms of exploitation intensity (mean residence time per visit) or in terms of path recursions (visit frequency) can easily be identified by combining and extending two procedures that were initially published to compute the residence time on the one hand and the movement-based UD on the other hand. Identifying the areas of a home range that are intensively exploited and/or repeatedly visited opens interesting perspectives in the study of the processes by which home range owners adapt their movement behavior to the dynamics of the resources they feed on.