TRACKING LITERATURE
The Tracking Literature library gathers research on tracks and signs, trailing, and animal behaviour and ecology, together with related fields such as human tracking, forensics, ichnology and taphonomy. Behaviour and natural history papers are here even when they never mention tracking, because understanding behaviour matters to trackers.
Search every field, or narrow the list with the filters. Each paper has its own page with a synopsis, keywords and the full citation. Where a paper is open access, or the authors or publisher have given permission, you can download the PDF; otherwise the page links to the publisher or a legal free copy.
2026PDF available
Resource-related interactions between wolverines and brown bears in Scandinavia
Wolverines are moving back into central Sweden’s boreal forest, right into brown bear country. By following GPS-collared wolverines to their feeding sites and reading the tracks and signs there, researchers found that bear kills may help feed wolverine families, while bears visiting hidden food caches may put cubs at risk.
2026PDF available
Where will the cat cross the road? Comparing camera and GPS-based models for identifying wildlife corridors
Where will a mountain lion cross a highway? On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, researchers compared corridor maps built from hundreds of trail cameras with maps built from GPS-collared mountain lions. GPS did better at predicting where young dispersing mountain lions travel, but the two approaches agreed most where it matters most, around the busy I-5 highway.
2025PDF available
Evaluating the accuracy of wolverine identification from photographs of snow tracks by expert observers in North America
Can experts tell a wolverine from a lynx or a fisher from photographs of tracks in snow alone? Twenty-nine observers each reviewed 99 verified track observations and called another species “definitely wolverine” less than 1% of the time. Observers with higher CyberTracker certification levels found the most wolverines, and clear photos of individual tracks gave the best results.
2025PDF available
Refining population density estimation from track counts: improving daily travel distance estimates through trailing of large herbivores in the Kalahari, Botswana
How far does an eland walk in a day? In Botswana's Kalahari, certified trackers followed the trails of eland, hartebeest, kudu, springbok and ostrich for 24 hours at a time, giving the first measured daily travel distances for these species there (eland: about 10.5 km). The results also showed that wide-ranging hunters and scavengers need a much larger correction than other species when day ranges are predicted from body size.
2025Publisher link
Resource selection of den sites for bobcats (Lynx rufus) in the Northern Great Plains, United States
Where does a bobcat mother hide her kittens? In South Dakota’s Black Hills, researchers found 27 dens of radio-collared females, mostly in rock crevices. The mothers chose rugged ground and spots screened at eye level by rocks and shrubs, hiding their kittens from coyotes and cougars, which hunt by sight.
2024PDF available
Monitoring wildlife abundance through track surveys: A capture-mark-recapture inspired approach to assess track detection by certified trackers in the Kalahari, Botswana
How many tracks do expert trackers miss from a moving vehicle? In Botswana's Kalahari, two pairs of certified trackers drove the same transects one after the other, and a capture-mark-recapture approach showed they detected about three-quarters of fresh tracks. They agreed on the species for 92% of fresh tracks, and their few disagreements cancelled out rather than biasing the counts.
2022PDF available
Inferring spatially varying animal movement characteristics using a hierarchical continuous-time velocity model
Where do wildebeest hurry, and where do they linger? Using six years of GPS data from 31 Serengeti wildebeest, researchers built a model that maps how fast and how straight animals move across a landscape. It revealed the migration’s main routes and showed wildebeest moving fastest and most directly near drainage lines, where lions lie in wait, and near villages.
2021Publisher link
Assessing and Certifying Indigenous Tracking Expertise and Skills
How do you certify knowledge that has been passed down for generations without a single written exam? Written by Louis Liebenberg together with nine San trackers for UNESCO, this report sets out how indigenous communities can assess and certify their own trackers in tracks and signs identification and trailing. It shows how critical discussion around a track is scientific peer review in its oldest form.
2021PDF available
Tracking Science: An Alternative for Those Excluded by Citizen Science
Who gets to be called a scientist? Twenty-nine co-authors, including 13 trackers, most of them San, and twelve of them CyberTracker Master Trackers, argue that “citizen science” can leave out Indigenous peoples and migrants. They propose “tracking science” instead: a term defined by how knowledge is made (observation, hypotheses, prediction and peer review), not by who makes it. From reading footprints to tracking subatomic particles, tracking may be the one metaphor that fits all of science.
2018PDF available
Can trackers count free-ranging wildlife as effectively and efficiently as conventional aerial survey and distance sampling? Implications for citizen science in the Kalahari, Botswana
Can trackers count wildlife as well as an aeroplane? In Botswana's Kalahari, trackers from Zutshwa counted nearly 20,000 track sets along the same transects flown by the national aerial survey. Their estimates for large grazers matched both aerial and ground counts, they counted all six large carnivores, and their survey cost 40% less than the aerial survey.
2017Publisher link
Smartphone Icon User Interface design for non-literate trackers and its implications for an inclusive citizen science
Some of the world’s best trackers cannot read or write, and for decades that kept them from recording scientific data. Louis Liebenberg, software developer Justin Steventon and five Kalahari and Karoo trackers tell how the CyberTracker icon interface changed that, from tracking individual rhinos in the Karoo to tracks-and-signs data that warned health authorities of Ebola weeks before human outbreaks. The paper is dedicated to co-author !Nate Brahman, who died before it was published.
2014PDF available
Animal Density and Track Counts: Understanding the Nature of Observations Based on Animal Movements
"But how do you avoid counting the same animal twice?" In the Kalahari, Keeping and Pelletier showed that, for estimating density from tracks with the Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin formula, you don't need to: every crossing counts. Using computer simulations, gemsbok and steenbok trails followed by trackers, and a field comparison with sightings, they found that the number of track crossings depends only on how many animals there are and how far they walk, not on how winding their paths are.
2014PDF available
Rapid assessment of wildlife abundance: estimating animal density with track counts using body mass–day range scaling rules
How many animals live in the southern Kalahari? Using track counts by an expert local tracker and a formula that converts tracks into density, Keeping estimated numbers for 36 species, from hares and mongooses to lions and tortoises, many of which no other survey method could count. He also found that Kalahari animals travel much farther each day than body-size rules predict, and showed how to correct for it.
2013Publisher link
The Origin of Science: The Evolutionary Roots of Scientific Reasoning and its Implications for Citizen Science
How did the human mind become able to do science? In this free book, Louis Liebenberg draws on decades of tracking with Kalahari hunters, including a kudu chase that nearly killed him, to argue that reading tracks and signs, and predicting where a trail will lead, uses the same reasoning as modern physics. He also traces how certified trackers and CyberTracker are bringing that ancient science into modern conservation.
2011Publisher link
Brown hyaenas on roads: Estimating carnivore occupancy and abundance using spatially auto-correlated sign survey replicates
How do you count a shy, mainly nocturnal scavenger across thousands of square kilometres of farmland? Researchers drove farm roads in South Africa’s North West Province looking for brown hyaena tracks and signs, and used occupancy models to estimate where the animals live and how many there are. Brown hyaenas were far more likely to be found where landowners were tolerant of carnivores and where there were wildlife farms.
2011PDF available
Interpretations of Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) Tracks by Inuit Hunters: Inter-rater Reliability and Inferences Concerning Accuracy
Can Inuit hunters tell a polar bear’s sex, age and size from their tracks on the sea ice? Nine hunters and elders from Nunavut independently read 78 polar bear tracks and largely agreed. Their sex estimates matched DNA from hair 74% of the time. Their shared clues, such as males’ inward-turned feet and soft snow meaning a fresh track, line up with what scientists have measured.
2011Publisher link
The Value, Limitations, and Challenges of Employing Local Experts in Conservation Research
What happens when you give an expert tracker a handheld computer and no instructions? In South Africa’s De Hoop Nature Reserve, a certified Senior Tracker walked 4653 km in 214 days and recorded 4684 mammals. He found 93% of the reserve’s nocturnal species, two species never recorded there before, and leopards thought long gone. The authors set out how researchers can identify, evaluate, and fairly reward local experts.
2009Publisher link
Determining Observer Reliability in Counts of River Otter Tracks
How reliable are track surveys when the observers have never been tested? In east Texas, which biologist did the otter survey mattered more than any habitat feature. In formal track and sign evaluations, experienced observers missed 37% of real otter tracks and called 26% of raccoon, opossum and swamp rabbit tracks “otter”. The good news: scores rose from 61% to 79% in just three months of evaluation and feedback.
2008PDF available
An animal movement model incorporating home range and habitat selection
How do you tell where a bear prefers to be from where it simply happens to wander? This 2008 paper built one model that estimates an animal’s home range and habitat preferences together from GPS collar data. They tested it on a female brown bear in Southeast Alaska during the salmon run, who strongly favoured large forest and avoided open, non-forested ground.
2006Publisher link
Estimating population density from indirect sign: track counts and the Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin formula
How can you turn tracks in the snow into a count of animals? A formula long used in Russia, but barely known elsewhere, does it from three numbers: how many fresh tracks cross a transect, how long the transect is, and how far the animal travels in a day. Using 40 years of deer track counts and trailing in Russia’s Sikhote-Alin reserve, the authors showed the formula is sound, and explained what limits its precision.
About the library
What is the Tracking Literature library?
A searchable collection of research papers on tracks and signs, trailing, and animal behaviour and ecology, gathered by Original Wisdom. Each paper has its own page with a plain-language summary, keywords, the full citation and a link to the paper.
Can I download the papers?
Where a paper is open access, or the authors or publisher have given permission, you can download the PDF from its page. Otherwise the page links to the publisher or to a legal free copy.
Who writes the summaries?
Kersey Lawrence of Original Wisdom summarises each paper: what the researchers did, found and concluded, how tracking was used, who did the tracking, and what it means for trackers.
How do I find papers on one species or place?
Type it in the search box, which searches every field including scientific names, or tick it in the Species or Region filter. Filters combine, so you can narrow the list to, for example, leopard papers from Botswana.
How should I cite a paper or a summary?
Each paper page gives the full citation and DOI of the original paper, and a ready-made citation for Original Wisdom's summary of it.