Fig. 2

Illustration of how missingness in animal location data reduces the number of valid steps that can be used in step-selection analyses (left panel) and how increasing forgiveness helps to retain additional steps that are otherwise omitted (right panel). At a missingness of 0, 998 valid steps can be obtained from the total of 1000 animal locations. At higher missingness, step durations become irregular, which means that the number of valid steps decreases substantially. However, if the modeler is willing to increase their forgiveness, additional steps can be gained. The right panel shows the number of valid steps that is gained when increasing the forgiveness from 1 to 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. Ribbons indicate the 95%-percentile intervals derived from 1000 replicates