HomeRange: A global database of mammalian home ranges

Motivation: Home range is a common measure of animal space use as 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 animal space use. 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 been historically biased toward terrestrial mammals. The use of aggregated numbers and terrestrial focus limits our ability to examine home range patterns across different environments, variation in time and between different levels of organisation. Here we introduce HomeRange, a global database with 75,611 home-range values across 960 different mammal species, including terrestrial, as well as aquatic and aerial species. Main types of variable contained: The dataset contains mammal home-range estimates, species names, methodological information on data collection, home-range estimation method, period of data collection, study coordinates and name of location, as well as species traits derived from the studies, such as body mass, life stage, reproductive status and locomotor habit. Spatial location and grain: The collected data is distributed globally. Across studies, the spatial accuracy varies, with the coarsest resolution being 1 degree. 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. For other studies, only the month or year is reported. Major taxa and level of measurement: Mammal species from 24 of the 27 different taxonomic orders. Home-range estimates range from individual-level values to population-level averages. Methods Mammalian home range papers were compiled via an extensive literature search. All home range values were extracted from the literature including individual, group and population-level home range values. Associated values were also compiled including species names, methodological information on data collection, home-range estimation method, period of data collection, study coordinates and name of location, as well as species traits derived from the studies, such as body mass, life stage, reproductive status and locomotor habit. Here we include the database, associated metadata and reference list of all sources from which home range data was extracted from. We also provide an R package, which can be installed from https://github.com/SHoeks/HomeRange. The HomeRange R package provides functions for downloading the latest version of the HomeRange database and loading it as a standard dataframe into R, plotting several statistics of the database and finally attaching species traits (e.g. species average body mass, trophic level) from the COMBINE (Soria et al. 2021) for statistical analysis