Animal ecology meets GPS-based radiotelemetry: a perfect storm of opportunities and challenges

This introductory review framed a special issue on GPS telemetry, arguing that cheap, dense location data had created both unprecedented opportunity and serious analytical risk for movement ecology. The authors emphasized that more data did not automatically mean better inference: location error, fix-rate bias, and autocorrelation could mislead naive analyses of home range and habitat selection. They called for methods and study designs matched to the questions being asked, and for closer integration of movement data with ecological theory. For felid researchers swimming in newly abundant GPS fixes, the paper was a clear-eyed warning and guide. It remains widely cited as the conceptual front door to rigorous use of telemetry data.