We characterized second- and third-order habitat
selection to identify habitat characteristics preferred by
the two-andthe three-toed sloth (Johnson1980). Secondorder
habitat selection reflects the habitat features that
individuals use to select the location of their home range,
whereas third-order selection reflects the habitat features
that individuals preferentially use within their home
range. For this analysis, we only included individuals
that had a minimum of 16 relocations and that were
not dispersing from their home range. We estimated
home ranges using 90% fixed kernel methods for 34
adult resident two-toed sloths (median = 64 relocations;
range: 16–179) and 33 (n = 30 adults; n = 3 subadults)
three-toed sloths (median = 50 relocations; range = 20–
212). Home ranges were delineated using ESRI’s ArcGIS
10.1 and the Geospatial Modelling Environment with
least-squares cross-validation (LSCV) as the smoothing
parameter (Millspaugh & Marzluff 2001). To evaluate
second-order habitat selection, we considered used
habitat as the proportion of each habitat type in each
sloth’s home range. We treated available habitat as the
proportion of each habitat type within the Minimum
Convex Polygon (MCP) of all sloths relocations of a given
species (i.e. pooled across individuals). Within the MCP,
we calculated available habitat in two different ways:
(1) as the proportion of all five habitats (cocoa, tropical
forest, pastures, monocultures and human development)
and (2) excluding the least-used habitats (monocultures