Abstract
The home range of an individual animal describes the geographic area where it spends most of the time while carrying out its common activities (eating, resting, reproduction, etc.). Motivated by the abundance of home range estimators, our aim is to review and categorize the statistical methodologies proposed in the literature to approximate the home range of an animal, based on a sample of observed locations. Further, we highlight that any statistical home range estimator is derived using a technique from the theory of set estimation, which aims to reconstruct a set on the basis of a multivariate random sample of points. We also address the open question of choosing the ``optimal″ home range from a collection of them constructed on the same sample. For clarity of exposition, we have applied all the estimation procedures to a set of real animal locations, using R as the statistical software. As a by-product, this review contains a thorough revision of the implementation of home range estimators in the R language.
