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Abstract Space use by animals is affected by multiple factors; previous researchers have examined the effects of influences, such as sex, body condition, and population density on home range area. However, evaluating the simultaneous influences of multiple factors on animal space use has been relatively intractable due to sample size limitations. We capitalize on National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) data to ask what factors determine space use by deer mice (genusPeromyscus). We examined data from 10 years of repeated captures of individually-identified mice at 36 sites across North America. We confirmed previous findings that males have larger home ranges than females and that home range area decreases with increasing animal density. In addition, our large sample size (N = 2,420 individuals) enabled us to examine the interacting influences of these, and other, phenotypic and extrinsic factors using a robust statistical framework. We found that the relationship between body condition and home range area differs between male and female mice, and that habitat type, latitude, and animal density all interact to influence space use. We conclude that data from large ecological networks can be used to examine important behavioral questions that have long eluded investigators. 

Synopsis Human activities are rapidly changing ecosystems around the world. These changes have widespread implications for the preservation of biodiversity, agricultural productivity, prevalence of zoonotic diseases, and sociopolitical conflict. To understand and improve the predictive capacity for these and other biological phenomena, some scientists are now relying on observatory networks, which are often composed of systems of sensors, teams of field researchers, and databases of abiotic and biotic measurements across multiple temporal and spatial scales. One well-known example is NEON, the US-based National Ecological Observatory Network. Although NEON and similar networks have informed studies of population, community, and ecosystem ecology for years, they have been minimally used by organismal biologists. NEON provides organismal biologists, in particular those interested in NEON's focal taxa, with an unprecedented opportunity to study phenomena such as range expansions, disease epidemics, invasive species colonization, macrophysiology, and other biological processes that fundamentally involve organismal variation. Here, we use NEON as an exemplar of the promise of observatory networks for understanding the causes and consequences of morphological, behavioral, molecular, and physiological variation among individual organisms.