Range residency determines how movement persistence shapes encounter rates

Abstract

Encounters between individuals link movement behavior to population-level processes such as predation and disease transmission. For many animal species, movement can be modeled as a multiscale stochastic process, dominated by directional persistence at short time scales and range residency at long time scales. Their separate effects on encounters are well understood: range residency can raise or lower encounter rates depending on home-range overlap, whereas moving with higher directional persistence systematically increases them. However, how directional persistence and range residency jointly determine encounters remains unknown. We present an analytical encounter theory for movement models that combine both features. In this framework, we derive a threshold in home-range overlap above which directional persistence diminishes, rather than enhances, encounters. At shorter time scales, attraction toward the home-range center displaces individual locations, altering encounter rates even when range residency is not measurable in movement tracks. Movement models fitted to short tracks can therefore describe trajectories accurately yet under- or overestimate the encounters derived from those trajectories, depending on home range spatial configuration. Encounter rates are a more demanding target for inference than movement parameters themselves.