Location Analysis

This panel provides a number of analyses of location data, which are used either to provide simple inter-location measures, including dispersal detection, or to estimate home ranges. A wide variety of different methods of range analysis have been published. Ranges implements those that have been used to produce refereed publications beyond a first description, including convex polygons (sometimes called minimum area convex polygons, MCPs or MAPs), #Concave Polygons,concave polygons (with restricted edges), polygons in #Clusters,clusters, #Ellipses, ellipses and contouring from #Harmonic Means,harmonic means and other density #Kernels,kernels. Grid cells may be plotted by selecting options within #Concave Polygons,concave polygons.

The pros and cons of these different techniques are discussed in more detail in the Review Of Home Range Analyses, review of home range analyses and for a more comprehensive recent review, see “A Manual for Wildlife Radio Tagging” (Kenward 2001) and Kenward et al. 2001.

Below you will find a brief outline of each technique and a link to a description of how it is implemented in Ranges.

Inter-location Measures

These are useful for providing plots and summary statistics from continuous recording sessions. Other applications include the estimation of indices of daily distances and speeds for animals tracked intermittently, and the investigation of dispersal, including a dispersal detector. More on this topic can be found here: inter-location measures.