Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
will advance best through research directed toward unambiguous analyses of
data. Gautestad and Mysterud (1995) implied the same when they argued that
boundaries of home ranges cannot be quantified precisely. Clearly, as White
and Garrott stated (1990:179), “home range estimates are a poor substitute for
good experimental protocol,” but home range estimates and good research
protocol are not mutually exclusive. Animals do have home ranges. They do
not move randomly through the world but stay in confined, local areas for
days, seasons, or even years. To understand why animals live where they do,
why they go certain places to do certain things, and how they share or divide
the locale, researchers must grapple with the concept of home range. For some
questions, researchers should do as White and Garrott and as Gautestad and
Mysterud suggested: Document exact animal locations, distances moved and
rates of movement between locations, and so forth. Answering other questions
will require estimates of home ranges, especially estimates of how animals use
space within their home ranges. Exploring the concept of home range will
improve our understanding of how animals conceive and perceive where they
live and will further our understanding of animals' cognitive maps of the land
in which they live. We have a sense of place for where we live; other animals
do, too. That is what we seek to understand.
Acknowledgments
Mike Mitchell, Consie Powell, Erran Seaman, and Luigi Boitani provided critical com-
ments on early drafts of this manuscript. Arild Gautestad and Ivar Mysterud provided
extremely helpful critical remarks. Piero Genovesi and Dave Mech graciously provided
unpublished data used in table 3.1 and figure 3.3.
Literature Cited
Ackerman, B. B., F. A. Leban, E. O. Garton, and M. D. Samuel. 1988 (2d ed).
User's man-
ual for program home range
. Forestry, Wildlife and Range Experiment Station Technical
Report. Moscow: University of Idaho.
Andersen, D. E. and O. J. Rongstad. 1989. Home-range estimates of red-tailed hawks
based on random and systematic relocations.
Journal of Wildlife Management
53: 802-
807.
Anderson, D. J. 1982. The home range: A new nonparametric estimation technique.
Ecol-
ogy
63: 103-112.
Armstrong, D. P. 1992. Correlation between nectar supply and aggression in territorial hon-
eyeaters: Causation or coincidence?
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
30: 95-102.
Barr, R. P. 1997.
Red-cockaded woodpecker habitat selection and landscape productivity in the
North Carolina Sandhills.
M.S. thesis. Raleigh: North Carolina State University.
