Conclusion
Beyond the specific accuracy measurements that are presented in this research, two important general patterns were found that have ecological implications for using current home range methods to analyze animal habitat and resource choices. First, perforated GPS-point patterns are often inaccurate when estimating home ranges, regardless of estimation method. This finding is ecologically important as many species live in areas where home ranges are perforated due to natural causes like topography or water bodies, or from human induced disturbances that cause habitat fragmentation. Second, locational accuracy was inconsistent for most methods. Though BRB was the most accurate and precise for the majority of tests (Table 1), it still produces relatively high EMD values for perforated patterns and had a fairly large variance for the majority of GPS-point patterns. PPA consistently maintained the highest location accuracy with the smallest variance.
While BRB was generally the most accurate method, different home range estimators may still be more appropriate for different questions (Table 1). For example, a researcher interested in avian home ranges, should consider using a combination of BRB, PPA, and T-LoCoH. In fact, since all the estimators have a large amount of uncertainty in their estimation, it is recommended that researchers or wildlife managers never rely exclusively on one home range estimator.