Effects of body size on estimation of mammalian area requirements

Accurately quantifying species’ area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area-based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home-range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in tracking data can result in space needs being severely underestimated. Based on previous work, we hypothesized the magnitude of underestimation varies with body mass, a relationship that could have serious conservation implications. To evaluate this hypothesis for terrestrial mammals, we estimated home-range areas with GPS locations from 757 individuals across 61 globally distributed mammalian species with body masses ranging from 0.4 to 4,000 kg. We then applied block cross-validation to quantify bias in empirical home-range estimates. Area requirements of mammals 1, meaning the scaling of the relationship changed substantially at the upper end of the mass spectrum.