A multi-patch use of the habitat: testing the First-Passage Time analysis on roe deer Capreolus capreolus paths

A heterogeneous environment includes several levels of resource aggregation. Individuals do not respond to this heterogeneity in the same way and their responses depend on the scale at which they perceive it, and they develop different foraging tactics accordingly. The development of methods to analyse animal movements has enabled the study of foraging tactics at several scales. Nevertheless, applied to large vertebrates, these methods have generally been used at large scales, such as for migration trips or for the study of marine patches several kilometres large. In our study, we applied a recent method, the First-Passage Time analysis, based on a measure of the foraging effort along the path, to a much finer scale, i.e.