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1. The distance travelled by animals is an important ecological variable that links behaviour, energetics and demography. It is usually measured by summing straight‐line distances between intermittently sampled locations along continuous animal movement paths. The extent to which this approach underestimates travel distance remains a rarely addressed and unsolved problem, largely because true movement paths are rarely, if ever, available for comparison. Here, we use simulated movement paths parameterized with empirical movement data to study how estimates of distance travelled are affected by sampling frequency.

2. We used a novel method to obtain fine‐scale characteristics of animal movement from camera trap videos for a set of tropical forest mammals and used these characteristics to generate detailed movement paths. We then sampled these paths at different frequencies, simulating telemetry …