Estimating utilization distributions from fitted step‐selection functions

Abstract Habitat‐selection analyses are often used to link environmental covariates, measured within some spatial domain of assumed availability, to animal location data that are assumed to be independent. Step‐selection functions ( SSF s) relax this independence assumption, by using a conditional model that explicitly acknowledges the spatiotemporal dynamics of the availability domain and hence the temporal dependence among successive locations. However, it is not clear how to produce an SSF ‐based map of the expected utilization distribution. Here, we used SSF s to analyze virtual animal movement data generated at a fine spatiotemporal scale and then rarefied to emulate realistic telemetry data. We then compared two different approaches for generating maps from the estimated regression coefficients. First, we considered a naïve approach that used the coefficients as if they were obtained by fitting an unconditional model. Second, we explored a simulation‐based approach, where maps were generated using stochastic simulations of the parameterized step‐selection process. We found that the simulation‐based approach always outperformed the naïve mapping approach and that the latter overestimated home‐range size and underestimated local space‐use variability. Differences between the approaches were greatest for complex landscapes and high sampling rates, suggesting that the simulation‐based approach, despite its added complexity, is likely to offer significant advantages when applying SSF s to real data.