Research overview: three-dimensional and seasonal home-range estimation

Standard home ranges flatten an animal's world onto a two-dimensional map, but cats in mountainous terrain move through strongly three-dimensional space, and their ranges shift across seasons. This overview surveys efforts to incorporate elevation and terrain into home-range estimates, capturing how snow leopards and pumas exploit cliffs, ridgelines, and valleys, and to estimate seasonal ranges separately rather than averaging across a year. Seasonal estimation reveals elevational migration tracking prey or snow, denning concentration during reproduction, and expansion during dispersal. The overview discusses the data and methodological demands of these richer representations and their payoff for understanding habitat selection in rugged landscapes. Moving beyond static, annual, planar ranges yields a more faithful picture of how felids actually occupy space and time.