Home range plus: a space-time characterization of movement over real landscapes

BACKGROUND: Advances in GPS technology have created both opportunities in ecology as well as a need for analytical tools that can deal with the growing volume of data and ancillary variables associated with each location. RESULTS: We present T-LoCoH, a home range construction algorithm that incorporates time into the construction and aggregation of local kernels. Time is integrated with Euclidean space using an adaptive scaling of the individual's characteristic velocity, enabling the construction of utilization distributions that capture temporal partitions of space as well as contours that differentiate internal space based on movement phase and time-use metrics. We test T-LoCoH against a simulated dataset and provide illustrative examples from a GPS dataset from springbok in Namibia. CONCLUSIONS: The incorporation of time into home range construction expands the concept of utilization distributions beyond the traditional density gradient to spatial models of movement and time, opening the door to new applications in movement ecology. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2051-3933-1-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.