Fifteen days are enough to estimate home-range size in some long-lived resident eagles

Abstract

In this paper, we show how many fixes are enough to define the territory of two long-lived resident raptors marked by GPS transmitters. To this end, we analyzed high-resolution GPS data from 50 territorial Bonelli’s eagles (Aquila fasciata) and 9 territorial Golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) equipped with GPS/GSM dataloggers. Our results show that between 2200 and 2800 fixes are enough to define the territory. This is interesting for movement ecology works where long-term GPS data series are not available.