Site fidelity—the tendency to return to previously visited locations—is widespread across taxa. Returns may be driven by several mechanisms, including memory, habitat selection, or chance; however, pattern‐based definitions group different generating mechanisms under the same label of ‘site fidelity’, often assuming memory as the main driver. We propose an operational definition of site fidelity as patterns of return that deviate from a null expectation derived from a memory‐free movement model. First, using agent‐based simulations, we show that without memory, intrinsic movement characteristics and extrinsic landscape characteristics are key determinants of return patterns and that even random movements may generate substantial probabilities of return. Second, we illustrate how to implement our framework empirically to establish ecologically meaningful, system‐specific null expectations for site fidelity. Our approach provides a conceptual and operational framework to test hypotheses on site fidelity across systems and scales.

Over many years, numerous agency biologists, wardens, students, and postdocs have contributed thousands of hours into planning, collecting, and analyzing the data that pertain to each of the herds described in this report. Many staff and students with Infographics Lab at the University of Oregon Department of Geography were involved in map design and production. These included research assistant Joanna Merson, and the following students:

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Elucidating factors that contribute to citation rates of scientific articles can help scientists write manuscripts that have a stronger influence on their scientific field and are accessible to a broad audience. Using a cohort of 778 articles published in The Journal of Wildlife Management from 2011–2015, we examined how visibility strategies, article structure, and focal system (all factors authors can predominantly control) influenced the accumulation of citations over various time frames within the first 5 years after publication, and the number of days until an article received its first citation. Visibility strategies (e.g., open access, increasing the Altmetric Attention Score, and self‐citations) all influenced the number of citations accrued following publication. Citations were more stochastic 1 year following publication compared to 5 years following publication, with only 20.1% of papers receiving a citation after 1 year compared to 92.5% of papers receiving a citation after 5 years. Our model explained much more of the variation after 5 years compared to after only 1 year (R2 = 0.57 and 0.12, respectively). The number of factors significantly associated with citation rates increased as the timeframe of our analysis increased. After 5 years, factors associated with article structure (e.g., number of references), focal system (e.g., methods papers), and visibility all increased citation counts of papers. Our work suggests citation rates within wildlife ecology are influenced by a number of controllable factors, and that authors pursuing a variety of visibility strategies can increase the influence of an article on science and management.