🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Attaching a transmitter to a wild cat raises hard design questions, and this overview surveys how hardware evolved to balance data return against animal welfare. Early ear-mounted and implanted tags g…

Connectivity has two distinct meanings often conflated in conservation, and this overview clarifies them. Structural connectivity describes the physical arrangement of habitat, whether patches are clo…

Movement and gene flow are related but not identical, and this overview examines how the two lines of evidence complement each other in assessing felid connectivity. Telemetry captures the movements o…

Hidden Markov models infer an animal's unobserved behavioral state, such as resting, foraging, or directed travel, from the statistical signatures of its movement, typically step lengths and turning a…

Local convex hull methods, known as LoCoH, build a home range from many small convex polygons constructed around each location and its nearest neighbors, then merge them into a utilization distributio…

As tracking datasets have grown to millions of points and multi-sensor streams, machine learning has become increasingly central to interpreting them. This overview surveys the application of supervis…

Animals do not move at random or solely in response to immediate cues; they remember productive sites, dangerous areas, and routes, and this overview examines how memory shapes felid movement. Evidenc…

Overall dynamic body acceleration, or ODBA, sums the dynamic component of acceleration across three axes to provide a low-cost proxy for an animal's rate of energy use. This overview explains the rati…

Before estimating a home range, one must verify that the animal actually has one, that its movement is range-resident rather than dispersing, migrating, or nomadic. This overview describes diagnostic…

This overview contrasts two dominant frameworks for analyzing habitat use from telemetry. Resource selection functions compare habitat at used locations with habitat available across some defined regi…

Roads influence felid movement in layered ways, and this overview synthesizes how telemetry reveals them acting simultaneously as sources of mortality, physical and behavioral barriers, and selective…

Home-range estimates depend not only on the animal but on how it was sampled, and this overview examines how the number of fixes and the interval between them shape the result. Too few locations under…

Any device added to an animal carries potential costs, and this overview examines research into the energetic and biomechanical burden of tags, drawing on the broader literature where careful experime…

Battery life is the hard ceiling on tracking duration, so engineers pursue energy harvesting to extend or even indefinitely sustain deployments. This overview covers solar panels integrated into colla…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

State-space models provide a unified statistical framework that separates the true, unobserved movement process from the noisy observation process that telemetry produces. This overview explains how t…

This concluding overview synthesizes how the study of felid movement has evolved from sparse VHF triangulation to dense, multi-sensor biologging that captures not only where cats go but what they do a…

The wildlife crossings along the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park constitute one of the longest-running, most comprehensively monitored road-mitigation programs in the world, and this…

The COVID-19 lockdowns created an unprecedented, sudden reduction in human activity dubbed the anthropause, and this overview examines what it revealed and may yet reveal about how cats respond to hum…

This overview traces how VHF radio-telemetry emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, when biologists such as the Craighead brothers fitted grizzly bears in Yellowstone with radio collars and proved that…

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 t…

Programmable drop-off mechanisms release a collar from the animal at a scheduled time, sparing researchers a second risky capture and ensuring the device does not burden the cat indefinitely. This ove…

Roads impede wildlife not only by the physical danger of traffic but through sensory disturbance, and this overview examines how noise and artificial light can deter felids from approaching or crossin…

Quantifying how much two animals' ranges overlap is central to questions of territoriality, social structure, and resource competition, and this overview surveys the statistical indices used. Measures…

This methodological review tackled two pervasive problems in GPS telemetry: locations are imprecise, and the probability of obtaining a fix at all depends on habitat, terrain, and canopy. Left uncorre…

Jacqueline L. Frair, John Fieberg, Mark Hebblewhite, Francesca Cagnacci, Nicholas J. DeCesare, Luca Pedrotti · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · 2010

Fleming and colleagues confronted a fundamental flaw in conventional kernel home-range estimation: it assumes location data are independent, yet modern GPS fixes are strongly autocorrelated in time, c…

Christen H. Fleming, William F. Fagan, Thomas Mueller, Kirk A. Olson, Peter Leimgruber, Justin M. Calabrese · Ecology · 2015

Although focused on small-mammal populations, this paper is widely credited with formalizing the minimum convex polygon as a measure of an animal's home range, the smallest convex shape enclosing all…

Carl O. Mohr · American Midland Naturalist · 1947

This influential review synthesized how rapidly improving tracking technology, from GPS tags to accelerometers and global data repositories, had turned animal movement into a powerful sensor network f…

Roland Kays, Margaret C. Crofoot, Walter Jetz, Martin Wikelski · Science · 2015

Fortin and colleagues used step-selection functions to show that elk in Yellowstone altered their fine-scale movement decisions in response to wolf predation risk, avoiding risky habitats such as open…

Daniel Fortin, Hawthorne L. Beyer, Mark S. Boyce, Douglas W. Smith, Thierry Duchesne, Julie S. Mao · Ecology · 2005

Calabrese, Fleming, and Gurarie released ctmm, an R package that treats telemetry data as samples from an underlying continuous-time movement process rather than a set of discrete points. The software…

Justin M. Calabrese, Christen H. Fleming, Eliezer Gurarie · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2016