Research overview: bobcat home ranges and territoriality

This overview examines bobcat spatial ecology, drawn from extensive telemetry research. Bobcats maintain home ranges that vary widely with prey density, habitat, and sex, with males ranging more widely and overlapping multiple females in a typical solitary, territorial felid system. Scent marking and scrapes advertise occupancy. Range size contracts in productive habitats and expands in poor ones, and juveniles disperse to establish their own territories. Understanding this spacing system informs density estimation, harvest management, and habitat planning, since the number of bobcats a landscape supports depends on how prey richness translates into territory size. The bobcat well-studied spatial ecology also serves as a reference for understanding the spacing behavior of less-studied small cats.