A fresh look at an old concept: Home-range estimation in a tidy world

A rich set of statistical techniques have been developed over the last several decades to estimate the spatial extent of animal home ranges from telemetry data, and new methods to estimate home ranges continue to be developed.

Here we investigate home-range estimation from a computational point of view and aim to provide a general framework for computing home ranges, independent of specific estimators.

We show how such a workflow can help make home-range estimation easier and more intuitive, and we provide a series of examples illustrating how different estimators can be compared easily, so that one can perform a sensitivity analysis to determine the degree to which the choice of estimator influences qualitative and quantitative conclusions.

By providing a standardized, tidy implementation of home-range estimators, we hope to equip analysts with the tools needed to explore how estimator choice influences answers to biologically meaningful questions.