Roe Deer Capreolus capreolus home-range Sizes Estimated from VHF and GPS Data

In this study, we compared kernel estimates of home-range size between VHF and GPS monitoring. We used three types of data to assess the monthly estimates of individual home-range size (VHF data based on 17 locations, subsampled GPS data based on 17 locations (with 1,000 replicates) and GPS data based on 720 locations) using three estimation methods for the smoothing parameter, h (reference, least-squares cross-validation (LSCV) and fix). For all the three smoothing parameters, individual home ranges estimated from VHF and GPS data using 17 locations had very similar size. On the other hand, the use of reference or LSCV h values led home-range sizes from VHF or GPS data using 17 locations to be larger than the estimate obtained from the whole set of GPS data (720 locations). Such results emphasise the influence of using too few locations per month. On the contrary, using h fixed at 60 led to a home-range size close to that obtained from the whole set of GPS locations. The centroid of locations for a given individual in a given month only changed a little according to the data set used (the difference being