Research overview: time-geography and revisitation analysis

Beyond static home ranges, researchers increasingly analyze how often and how regularly an animal returns to particular places, using revisitation and residence-time metrics. This overview describes time-explicit approaches, including time-local convex hulls and recursion analysis, that count visits, measure time spent, and quantify the periodicity of returns to sites such as kills, dens, scent-marking spots, or water. For cats, revisitation patterns reveal caching behavior at carcasses, denning during reproduction, and routine patrolling of territorial boundaries. The overview explains how these metrics extract behavioral structure from trajectories that simple area estimates miss. By emphasizing the temporal dimension of space use, revisitation analysis connects movement geometry to the recurring activities, feeding, breeding, and marking, that organize felid lives.