Résumé
Most animals restrain their movement activities to familiar areas which leads to home ranges. Although understanding both establishment and shifts of home ranges is highly relevant for basic science and conservation, pinpointing the factors that shape the dynamics of home ranges remains a challenge. Evidently home ranges are influenced by the underlying landscape. Landscape composition, i.e., the fraction of different land cover types, has recently been shown to affect home range size. Yet, the explicit spatial configuration of the landscape, a factor which is known to be of central importance in spatial ecology, is not taken into account by most studies. We quantify the effect of landscape configuration on summer home range sizes across multiple spatio-temporal scales using GPS data from two behaviorally distinct ungulate species, red (Cervus elaphus) and roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), in the Bavarian Forest National Park, Germany. We show that the spatial configuration of the landscape is the dominant factor explaining home range size. Furthermore, we find that the shape of the relationship between home range size and landscape configuration depends on a species' habitat requirements: while roe deer decrease their home range size with increasing landscape patchiness, the relationship is hump-shaped for red deer. Our results are robust at all tested spatio-temporal scales.