Space use of cougars at the northern edge of their range

Abstract

Abstract The space use strategies animals use to acquire resources needed for survival and reproduction reflect life history traits and individual behaviors. For large solitary carnivores, such as cougars (Puma concolor), prey, mates, and safe habitat in which to raise offspring, are resources that influence space use. Most animal home range studies investigate differences between sexes but fail to explore the space use patterns among individuals. We first used 95% minimum convex polygon (MCP), kernel density estimate (KDE), and Brownian bridge estimator (BB), to estimate the home range of 43 cougars satellite-collared in west-central Alberta, Canada, in 2016–2018. We found that adult males (MCP = 498 km2; KDE = 623 km2; BB = 547 km2) had home ranges that were more than twice the size of those of adult females (MCP = 181 km2; KDE = 273 km2; BB = 217 km2). We then used net squared displacement, path segmentation analysis, and multi-response permutation procedure, to examine the space use patterns of 27 female and 16 male cougars. We constructed a decision tree and found that 23% of cougars were dispersers (12% of females and 44% of males), 47% were residents (58% of females and 31% of males), 9% were seasonal home range shifters (12% of females and 6% of males), and 19% shifted to a new area during the study period (19% of females and 19% of males). We learned that dispersers all were subadults, whereas all residents, seasonal shifters, and shifters, were adults, except for one subadult male. Our study provides insights on animal home ranges with methods to categorize different space use strategies which could be used to help assess the dynamics of a population.