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.
2011PDF available
Forensic Spoorology: Seeing and Understanding Human Behavior through Observation, Classification and Interpretation of Spoor Evidence
Can a trail of footprints show not just who walked by, but whether they were calm, lost or afraid? A U.S. Marshals master tracker sets out a step-by-step method for reading human behaviour from tracks, tests it with five volunteers in a riding arena, and argues for tracking’s place as a forensic science in court.
2011Publisher link
Improving occupancy estimation when two types of observational error occur: non-detection and species misidentification
Most wildlife surveys allow for missing an animal that is there, but not for recording one that is not. Using frog call surveys in Maryland and computer simulations, these researchers show that even rare misidentifications can make a species look far more widespread than it is, and that more survey visits make the problem worse. Their new models separate “certain” from “uncertain” records, and their own example of an uncertain record is a track or a scat.
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
Linking landscape characteristics to local grizzly bear abundance using multiple detection methods in a hierarchical model
Where do grizzly bears actually live in greatest numbers? By collecting hair from baited wire traps and from trees that bears rub on around Glacier National Park, Montana, researchers identified 222 individual bears by their DNA. Both males and females were fewer where roads were dense, and females were more common where there was more moist habitat.
2011PDF available
Macropod habitat use and response to management interventions in an agricultural–forest mosaic in north-eastern Tasmania as inferred by scat surveys
Can droppings tell you where wallabies feed and how they react to culling and fencing? In north-east Tasmania, researchers counted pademelon and wallaby scats on 127 transects through a year and found both species favoured farmland, while shooting and fencing only cut their use of it close to where the work was done. A side experiment showed most scats last for months, making them a reliable record of where the animals had been.
2011PDF available
Mechanics and Energetics of Excavation by Burrowing Wolf Spiders, Geolycosa spp.
How does a spider dig a hole 13 cm deep? Burrowing wolf spiders in Mississippi loosen soil with their fangs, carry about 918 tiny soil pellets up on their jaws, and fling them away with their front legs. The researchers worked out that a burrow costs roughly the energy of one to three eggs, more in hard clay than in sand.
2011PDF available
Monitoring Carnivore Populations at the Landscape Scale: Occupancy Modelling of Tigers from Sign Surveys
How do you map tigers across 38,000 km² of forest and farmland in India? Teams of trackers walked 4,174 km of forest trails, recording tiger tracks and scats, and the researchers modelled how often signs are missed. Tigers turned out to occupy about two-thirds of the available habitat, nearly twice what a simple tally of signs suggested, and were most likely to be present where prey was plentiful and livestock scarce.
2011Publisher link
Non-Invasive Methods to Assess Co-Occurrence of Mammalian Carnivores
Which works best for finding carnivores: walking for tracks and scats, cameras, hair traps or track plates? On the rims of Grand Canyon, searching for tracks and signs gave the most detections, cameras and track plates were best at catching common species, and hair traps mostly failed. Along the way the study found that coyotes and bobcats never shared a site on the North Rim.
2011PDF available
Northern Birch Mouse (Sicista betulina) in Lithuania, Findings in the Diet of Tawny Owl (Strix aluco)
How do you find one of the rarest mice in Lithuania? Ask a tawny owl. Over 14 years, owl pellets and nest-box leftovers yielded 31 northern birch mice among more than 5000 mammal prey, and showed that owls caught them near spruce forests, mostly in years when their usual voles were in short supply.
2011PDF available
Predicting carnivore occurrence with noninvasive surveys and occupancy modeling
Can dogs that sniff out scat help map where elusive carnivores live? Across Vermont, detection dog teams, cameras and hair snares surveyed 168 sites for black bears, fishers and bobcats. Bears turned out to follow forest and avoid development, fishers were found almost everywhere but were hard to predict, and bobcats were too rarely detected to model with confidence.
2011PDF available
Scat analysis reveals a wide set of plant species to be potentially dispersed by foxes
What does a fox leave behind besides a scent mark? Researchers in Belgium sieved 303 fox scats and found 5207 seeds from 77 kinds of plants, from blackberries and hawthorn to birch, millet, sunflower and sesame from bread rolls. Foxes may be quiet gardeners, carrying seeds across the landscape, though whether those seeds grow is still unknown.
2011PDF available
Scent marking in wild banded mongooses: 1. Sex-specific scents and overmarking
When a banded mongoose sniffs a scent mark, they often leave their own mark right on top. Watching nine wild groups in Uganda, researchers found that males overmark other males and females overmark other females, and that this same-sex habit only develops as young mongooses reach maturity. It points to a quiet scent war over mates being fought inside the family group.
2011PDF available
Site Occupancy and Cavity Use by the Northern Flying Squirrel in the Boreal Forest
Where does a flying squirrel sleep when it is -40 °C outside? Radio-tracking squirrels through a Quebec winter, researchers found them in woodpecker holes, in nests built in conifer branches and even in burrows up to a metre underground. Males favoured branch nests in the cold and females favoured ground nests, so tree cavities turned out not to be the limiting resource many expected.
2011PDF available
Species Occupancy Modeling for Detection Data Collected Along a Transect
Tiger footprints are not spread evenly through the forest: they bunch up along ridges and trails. Using footprint surveys from Sumatra’s Kerinci Seblat National Park, statisticians built occupancy models that use the exact position of each footprint along a transect, and showed that ignoring this clustering underestimates how much of the landscape tigers use.
2011PDF available
The Use of Fluorescent Powdered Pigments as a Tracking Technique for Snakes
What if a snake left a glowing trail behind them? Researchers in Edmonton, Canada, dusted garter snakes with fluorescent powder and followed their paths by ultraviolet light at night, some for more than 200 m. The trails showed exactly where each snake went, how they wandered just after release before settling into straighter paths, and which ones disappeared into burrows that could be winter dens.
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.
2011PDF available
Use of faecal pellet size to differentiate age classes in female Svalbard reindeer Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus
Can a handful of droppings tell you how old a reindeer is? Measuring the pellets of marked female Svalbard reindeer on Svalbard, Norway, researchers found that combining length, width and depth sorted calves, yearlings and adults correctly about 91% of the time, while any single measurement was much less reliable. They suggest pellet measurements, paired with DNA to tell males from females, could become a cheap, hands-off way to read the age structure of wild herds.
2011PDF available
Wildlife tracking technology options and cost considerations
Should you put GPS, Argos or a simple radio collar on your study animal? Drawing on their own work with elephants, falcons, a crocodile and albatrosses, the authors built a step-by-step guide to choosing a tracking technology and showed that while each animal cost about US$7000 to US$9000 a year to track, the cost per location ranged from US$5 to over US$50.
2010Publisher link
An account of badger diet in an arid steppe region of Mongolia
In much of Europe, badgers live largely on earthworms. In the dry steppe of central Mongolia, scats tell a different story: grasshoppers and beetles made up most of what badgers ate, with lizards, rodents, fruit and the odd food wrapper on the side, and not a single earthworm.
2010Publisher link
Bed Site Selection by Neonate Deer in Grassland Habitats on the Northern Great Plains
Where does a newborn deer hide when there are hardly any trees? Following 81 radio-collared fawns on the South Dakota prairie, researchers found they chose beds in the tallest grass they could find, while male fawns bedded in more open spots than females. As set-aside grasslands were ploughed for wheat, more fawns bedded in the crops and more of them died.
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.