Analyzing animal movements using Brownian bridges

Horne and colleagues introduced the Brownian bridge movement model to home-range and movement analysis, explicitly incorporating the time order of locations and the uncertainty of an animal's path between successive fixes. Rather than treating fixes as independent points, the method models movement as a constrained random walk, estimating the probability of presence along the route connecting consecutive locations. This yields utilization distributions that reflect actual travel corridors and account for fix interval and location error. The approach was a conceptual advance over kernel methods, which ignore temporal structure, and it underpinned later dynamic and continuous-time models. For felid researchers, Brownian bridges enabled more realistic depictions of movement pathways and migration routes from telemetry, marking a shift toward movement-based home-range estimation.