Using pitfall traps arrays to estimate the home range of a Cerrado lizard in Central Brazil

Although the broad distribution of a species is ruled by several biotic and abiotic factors, the spatial distribution of a local population is affected by social interactions between individuals, competition (intra and interspecific), predation and resource availability (Brown et al., 2009). In a finer scale perspective, the home range is a small portion of the available habitat used by an individual within a population that provides its everyday needs, such as food, shelter and reproductive mates (Ferner, 1974; Perry and Garland Jr, 2002), with the individual completing its entire life cycle within this area (Rose, 1982). Home range is crucial information for studies focusing on mating systems or territoriality (Melo et al., 2017). The size of an individual home range is shaped by species ecology and behavior (Rose, 1982), and is related to species social system, individual social status, resource use and availability, and group cohesion (Stone et al., 2002). Changes in home range size (in space or in time), for example, can be produced by the species’ biology, but also by individuals’ social interactions (Ferner, 1974) and habitat fragmentation (Young et al., 2018). These changes are often larger for larger animals (or individuals) and species of higher trophic status (Rocha, 1999; Mitchell and Powell, 2012). Territories are areas inside home ranges that are exclusively used by an individual and are often defended against the entrance of other individuals, cospecific or not (Schoener, 1968), and can be smaller or close in area to the home range. In territorial systems, the individuals usually defend all their home range, often using a set of warning or aggressive behaviours to exclude other individuals from the territory (Stone et al., 2002), diminishing home range overlaps. Although the territory size may be variable, it is sometimes inflexible and populations are expected to be regulated in stable densities (Adams, 2001). As resource availability commonly changes with time and between different habitats, the density in natural populations tends to Herpetology Notes, volume 11: 985-991 (2018) (published online on 26 November 2018)