Dispersal and territorial establishment in jaguars

[rebeca calanoce]

Hello Chris and team,

I hope you are all doing well.

I have a beginner's question. I'm working with telemetry data for jaguars at a continental scale, using both the database from Morato et al. (2018) and data from my current lab. When looking at activity area patterns, I notice significant heterogeneity for some individuals. For example, in the Pantanal, I obtained an AKDE between 500 and 600 for two females, where the result for one of them matches the published article. Most individuals in the Pantanal present small activity areas due to good conservation status and prey availability, among other factors.

Could this variation be explained by the fact that these individuals were searching for territory at the time of evaluation? All the individuals included showed residency, but is there any measure through the VSF timelag that could indicate these were individuals dispersing and then establishing territory?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards,
Rebeca

[Christen Fleming]

Hi Rebeca,

Sorry for the delay.

I do believe that much of the heterogeneity in the jaguar ranges is due to non-stationarity, and that much of that non-stationarity is dispersal behavior.

In the Morato et al. paper, we applied a threshold to the effective sample size and visual inspection of the variogram to look for an asymptote. Many jaguars were not included in the home-range analysis.

Currently, we are working on developing better methods for classification and segmentation of resident behavior and the jaguar dataset is one of the key datasets that we are testing on, because it is particularly challenging in this regard.

Best,

Chris