HomeRange: A global database of mammalian home ranges

Motivation: Home range is a common measure of use of space by animals because it provides ecological information that is useful for conservation applications. In macroecological studies, values are typically aggregated to species means to examine general patterns of use of space by animals. However, this ignores the environmental context in which the home range was estimated and does not account for intraspecific variation in home range size. In addition, the focus of macroecological studies on home ranges has historically been biased towards terrestrial mammals. The use of aggregated numbers and the terrestrial focus limit our ability to examine home-range patterns across different environments, their variation in time and variation between different levels of organization. Here, we introduce HomeRange, a global database with 75,611 home-range values across 960 different species of mammals, including terrestrial, aquatic and aerial species. Main types of variables contained: The dataset contains estimates of home ranges of mammals, species names, methodological information on data collection, method of home-range estimation, period of data collection, study coordinates and name of location, in addition to species traits derived from the studies, such as body mass, life stage, reproductive status and locomotor habit.Spatial location and grain: The collected data are distributed globally. Across studies, the spatial accuracy varies, with the coarsest resolution being 1 degrees. Time period and grain: The data represent information published between 1939 and 2022. Across studies, the temporal accuracy varies; some studies report start and end dates specific to the day, whereas for other studies only the month or year is reported. Major taxa and level of measurement: Mammalian species from 24 of the 27 different taxonomic orders. Home-range estimates range from individual-level values to population-level averages. Software format: Data are supplied as a comma-delimited text file (.csv) and can be loaded directly into R using the HomeRange R package (https://github.com/SHoek s/HomeR ange).

Automated summary

Home range is an important measure for understanding animal space use. However, previous macroecological studies have not fully considered the environmental context and intraspecific variation. This study introduces HomeRange, a global database with 75,611 home-range values of 960 mammal species, including terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial species. The database provides detailed information on species traits and methodological aspects.