We characterized second- and third-order habitat
selection to identify habitat characteristics preferred by
the two- and the 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