1. Animals often display a marked tendency to return to previously visited locations that contain important resources, such as water, food, or developing brood that must be provisioned. A considerable body of work has demonstrated that this tendency is strongly expressed in ants, which exhibit fidelity to particular sites both inside and outside the nest. However, thus far many studies of this phenomena have taken the approach of reducing an animal's trajectory to a summary statistic, such as the area it covers.
2. Using both simulations of biased random walks, and empirical trajectories from individual rock ants, Temnothorax albipennis, we demonstrate that this reductive approach suffers from an unacceptably high rate of false negatives.
3. To overcome this, we describe a site‐centric approach which, in combination with a spatially‐explicit null model, allows the identification of the important sites towards which individuals exhibit statistically significant biases.
4. Using the ant trajectories, we illustrate how the site‐centric approach can be combined with social network analysis tools to detect groups of individuals whose members display similar space‐use patterns.
5. We also address the mechanistic origin of individual site fidelity; by examining the sequence of visits to each site, we detect a statistical signature associated with a self‐attracting walk – a non‐Markovian movement model that has been suggested as a possible mechanism for generating individual site fidelity.

中文翻译：

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测量动物社会内的地点保真度和空间隔离。

1. 
   动物通常表现出明显的倾向，即返回先前访问过的含有重要资源的地点，例如水、食物或必须提供的发育中的幼崽。大量的研究表明，这种倾向在蚂蚁身上表现得很强烈，它们对巢穴内外的特定地点都表现出忠诚度。然而，迄今为止，对这种现象的许多研究都采取了将动物的轨迹简化为汇总统计数据的方法，例如它所覆盖的区域。
2. 
   使用有偏随机游走的模拟和个体岩蚁Temnothorax albipennis的经验轨迹，我们证明这种还原方法的假阴性率高得令人无法接受。
3. 
   为了克服这个问题，我们描述了一种以站点为中心的方法，该方法与空间显式零模型相结合，可以识别个体表现出统计显着偏差的重要站点。
4. 
   使用蚂蚁轨迹，我们说明了如何将以站点为中心的方法与社交网络分析工具相结合，以检测其成员表现出相似空间使用模式的个体群体。
5. 
   我们还解决了单个站点保真度的机械起源问题；通过检查每个站点的访问顺序，我们检测到与自吸引行走相关的统计特征——一种非马尔可夫运动模型，已被建议作为生成单个站点保真度的可能机制。