No evidence for the consistent effect of supplementary feeding on home range size in terrestrial mammals

Food availability and distribution are key drivers of animal space use. Supplemental food provided by humans can be more abundant and predictable than natural resources. It is thus believed that supplementary feeding modifies the spatial behaviour of wildlife. Yet, such effects have not been tested quantitatively across species. Here, we analysed changes in home range size due to supplementary feeding in 23 species of terrestrial mammals using a meta-analysis of 28 studies. Additionally, we investigated the moderating effect of factors related to i) species biology (sex, body mass, taxonomic group), ii) feeding regimen (duration, amount, purpose), and iii) methods of data collection and analysis (source of data, estimator, spatial confinement). We found no consistent effect of supplementary feeding on changes in home range size. While an overall tendency of reduced home range was observed, moderators varied in the direction and strength of the trends. Our results suggest that multiple d..., We used Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, two publisher-independent global citation databases, to identify published articles that analysed the effect of supplementary feeding on home range size in terrestrial mammals.We extracted home range size, its standard deviation (SD), and sample size from each publication for the experimental group of animals with supplementary feeding and the control group without.For each home range comparison, we compiled information about the species, its taxonomic group (rodent, carnivore, and ungulate), individual's sex, supplementary food amount (limited or ad libitum) and feeding duration, spatial confinement (free-ranging or enclosure), source of spatial data (telemetry or capture-mark-recapture), and home range estimator (kernel density estimation (KDE) or minimum convex polygon (MCP)). Moreover, we divided the publications into intentional and unintentional feeding studies.To measure the change of the home range size from no-feeding to feeding treatmen..., , # Paper

No evidence for the consistent effect of supplementary feeding on home range size in terrestrial mammals

# Author

Astrid Olejarz and Tomasz Podgórski

# Data and Coding

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qjq2bvqp5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qjq2bvqp5)

## Description of the data and file structure

This README file describes the columns of the CSV file accompanying the above publication. The CSV file collects the data of all articles used for the meta-analysis.  Cells with \"NA\" represent not available date. All analyses in R were performed based on the data collection in the CSV file.

Website - Website used for the created Boolean operator

Author - Main author of the article

Year - Year of publication of the article

Animal - Species name of the studied animal

Classification - Classification of the species based on the order

Classification - Classification of the species based on the diet

Country - The country in which the article has been conducted

Continent - The c...