Box 2 Guide for the memory-informed movement modeling within SSF framework

Are animals more likely to visit areas that are more familiar to them?

Feral hogs primarily rely on recent experiences when making night time foraging decisions [76].

Occurrence Distribution (OD)

The effects of unmodeled environmental drivers may be wrongly attributed to memory and vice versa [79].

Time window for measuring past space use.

Length of burn-in periods (how much early positional data to sacrifice to estimate the familiarity predictor?)

Do animals prefer to visit areas they have not visited recently? (and if so, is there an optimal return time based on foraging or predation experience?)

Predators like wolves and brown bears delay returning to previously visited kill sites so that prey numbers may rebound to normal levels [45, 92].

Time Since Last Visit (TSLV)

The effects of unmodeled environmental drivers may be wrongly attributed to memory and vice versa [79].

TSLV may be relatively homogeneous within an animal’s movement kernel.

“Patch” size (what is the typical spatial grain of the animal’s cognitive map?)

Length of burn-in periods (how much early positional data to sacrifice to estimate the familiarity predictor?)

Do migratory animals use consistent migration routes to return to the same seasonal ranges each year?

Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) have been shown to use the exact same migration routes and seasonal ranges, likely relying on their memory of those spatial locations to help them navigate [67].

Distance and directional bias toward previously used areas across large spatial scales

The effects of unmodeled environmental drivers and social cues may be wrongly attributed to memory and vice versa [79].

Whether to use angular covariates or distance-to covariates.

Time window for measuring past space use.