Biologging across space and time: studying a terrestrial species at its distribution range scale

GPS tracking is probably becoming the most common biologging approach to study species in Terrestrial Ecology. Reasons of success include a) the high relevance given to spatial position to relate terrestrial animals to the environment; b) the possibility to exploit the parallel fast development of remote sensing techniques in providing high coverage maps; and c) the need to track the effect of human induced changes at a multi-scale level, e.g. from local microclimates to large continental effects, for conservation and management purposes. Animals show proximate responses to changes in seasonality and habitat loss through movement and use of space. Emergence of movement behaviour can be scaled up from individual space use tactics, to populations and meta-populations. With a purely bottom-up approach, the EURODEER group has shared a multi-population dataset of a small deer characterised by high ecological plasticity (the European roe deer, Capreolus capreolus), and has contributed to a multiuse platform for biologged data (www.eurodeer.org). We have investigated the complexity of the ecology of this adaptable species in dependence of environmental and climate-dependent factors, in a robust manner (i.e., testing the effects across a latitudinal and habitat continuum). We present a range of study cases, and some peculiarities of this initiative