Abstract Accurately quantifying species’ area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area‐based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home‐range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in tracking data can result in space needs being severely underestimated. Based on the previous work, we hypothesized the magnitude of underestimation varies with body mass, a relationship that could have serious conservation implications. To evaluate this hypothesis for terrestrial mammals, we estimated home‐range areas with global positioning system (GPS) locations from 757 individuals across 61 globally distributed mammalian species with body masses ranging from 0.4 to 4000 kg. We then applied block cross‐validation to quantify bias in empirical home‐range estimates. Area requirements of mammals <10 kg were underestimated by a mean approximately15%, and species weighing approximately100 kg were underestimated by approximately50% on average. Thus, we found area estimation was subject to autocorrelation‐induced bias that was worse for large species. Combined with the fact that extinction risk increases as body mass increases, the allometric scaling of bias we observed suggests the most threatened species are also likely to be those with the least accurate home‐range estimates. As a correction, we tested whether data thinning or autocorrelation‐informed home‐range estimation minimized the scaling effect of autocorrelation on area estimates. Data thinning required an approximately93% data loss to achieve statistical independence with 95% confidence and was, therefore, not a viable solution. In contrast, autocorrelation‐informed home‐range estimation resulted in consistently accurate estimates irrespective of mass. When relating body mass to home range size, we detected that correcting for autocorrelation resulted in a scaling exponent significantly >1, meaning the scaling of the relationship changed substantially at the upper end of the mass spectrum.

中文翻译：

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体型对哺乳动物面积需求估计的影响


摘要 准确量化物种的面积需求是有效区域保护的先决条件。这通常涉及收集感兴趣物种的跟踪数据，然后进行栖息地分析。问题在于，跟踪数据中的自相关可能会导致空间需求被严重低估。根据之前的工作，我们假设低估的程度随体重的变化而变化，这种关系可能会产生严重的保护影响。为了评估陆地哺乳动物的这一假设，我们利用全球定位系统 (GPS) 位置估计了全球分布的 61 个哺乳动物物种中的 757 个个体的活动范围，这些哺乳动物的体重范围为 0.4 至 4000 公斤。然后，我们应用块交叉验证来量化经验家庭范围估计中的偏差。哺乳动物的面积要求 <10 id=16>1，这意味着关系的缩放在质谱的上端发生了显着变化。