Rethinking connectivity through reused wildlife travel routes

A new study addresses that gap by asking whether reliance on reused travel routes differs systematically among carnivores, and whether those differences persist across landscapes. Rather than focusing on destinations or habitat patches, the research emphasizes movement pathways themselves as a defining feature of space use.

A key contribution is the use of a formal framework to identify and quantify “routeways,” defined as directionally constrained but imperfectly aligned paths that animals repeatedly use within their home ranges. By applying this framework across many species and environments, the research moves beyond single-species case studies and provides a rare comparative view of how internal movement structure varies in ways that matter for landscape connectivity.

To address these questions, researchers analyzed GPS movement data from over 1,200 individual carnivores representing 16 canid species and 18 felid species across six continents. The dataset included over four million GPS fixes collected from animals occupying deserts, forests, savannas, and human influenced landscapes.

Using established movement modeling techniques, researchers  first estimated individual home ranges from each GPS track. They then applied spatial models to identify probability ridges, which are statistical features that reveal where animals repeatedly traveled along similar paths.

Two main metrics were derived: routeway density, which measures how much of a home range is structured by reused routes, and routeway use intensity, which reflects how strongly animals concentrate their activity along those routes. Models accounted for home range size, habitat characteristics, hunting strategy, and phylogenetic relationships.

The results were striking and highly consistent. Across the global dataset, canids showed substantially higher routeway density than felids, averaging about 15% more reused routes within their home ranges. When comparisons were limited to landscapes where both canids and felids were tracked side by side, this difference increased to more than 30%.

Canids also concentrated more of their activity along these routeways, with some species spending 20-40% of their time near the core of reused paths. Importantly, these differences persisted even after controlling for habitat, movement speed, and data quality, and individual species showed remarkable consistency in routeway density across very different landscapes.

From a conservation and management perspective, these findings have important implications. They suggest that connectivity is not just about linking habitat patches, but also about understanding how different species internally structure their movements within connected landscapes. For species that strongly reuse routeways, disruption of key paths by roads, fencing, or development may have outsized effects on movement, encounter rates, and conflict risk. Conversely, species that move more diffusely may respond differently to the same landscape changes.

More broadly, this research highlights that evolutionary history shapes how animals use space, with consequences for corridor design, connectivity modeling, and multispecies planning. Effective conservation strategies will need to move beyond one size fits all assumptions about movement and instead account for how different species actually navigate connected landscapes. In the context of conservation planning for connectivity, recognizing these differences can lead to corridors and management actions that better reflect real animal movement and improve outcomes across diverse wildlife communities.

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