The area of study is 420,000 ha and the home range of the species varies from 0.2 to 20 km^2 based on sex and season. My data-set of the presence of the species is too compressed and I'm wondering about the minimum distance each point should have with another and about the pixel size of layers in GIS?
This is a delicate decision that needs to be made. We discussed some of the challenges in
Bettinger, P., M. Lennette, K.N. Johnson, and T.A. Spies. 2005. A hierarchical spatial framework for forest landscape planning. Ecological Modelling. 182: 25-48.
Please have a look at our endemic and bear articles from the same research area (Majella) with almost the same environmental predictor layers, for our considerations in selecting a resolution.
Further, we avoided the a priori use of 'habitat', 'home' and niche in a spatial modelling context, as discussed in some Q&A on this site.
Selection of an optimal pixel size often remains a challenging task in spatial modeling. As a rule of thumb, pixel sizes should be small enough to capture the spatial characteristics of a given event or species over the landscape and large enough to reduce computing complexity.
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