First paragraph… Individual mountain lions can occupy large areas of land, and on a private lands landscape this means making use of terrain across multiple ranches. Home range estimates are a way of quantifying the area of land that an animal uses. We estimated home range sizes for mountains lions in 2 ways: Minimum convex polygons (MCPs) and Utilization Distributions (UDs).

This is the remainder of the text. An MCP incorporates all of the location data points that we have collected for a particular animal by drawing a convex polygon around the outermost points. This often overestimates the area that an animal will actually use, but is a good visual representation of the area that an individual could potentially impact.

MCPs averaged 245 mi², but varied considerably between individuals. Average subadult MCPs were much larger than adult MCPs, likely because of the inclusion of dispersal or long-range movements that do not necessarily represent increases in actual use. Adult MCPs ranged from 9-400 mi², and averaged 151 mi². In general, the MCPs we observed were larger than have been previously recorded in west Texas.

The second way we estimated home range was with 50% and 95% UDs using a program called T-LoCoH. This method factors in both space and time, to determine which areas the animal spends the most time in and effectively describes a “core” area of use (50% UD) as well as an estimate of overall use of space (95% UD).

Adult female MCP and 95% and 50% UD averages were all smaller than the averages for adult males. TXM07, an adult male, had the largest 50% core area (98 mi2), the largest 95% UD (251 mi²), and the largest MCP (387 mi²) when excluding individuals who made long-range or dispersal movements.

Mountain lions use large areas and travel great distances. Our results show that on average a mountain lion may cross 25 or more private ranches. This accentuates the need for a landscape-level approach to management of mountain lions in Texas.