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.
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.
2008Publisher link
Comparing methods for sampling large- and medium-sized mammals: camera traps and track plots
Sand or camera? In a Brazilian savanna reserve, researchers set ten camera traps facing ten sand track plots and checked both daily for ten days. Footprints picked up more animals, especially smaller ones, and were cheaper for a short survey, while cameras identified species more precisely and became cheaper over a month. Used together, the two methods complement each other.
2008Publisher link
Counting Pumas by Categorizing Physical Evidence
How do you count an animal you almost never see? For 27 years, a team of puma hunters counted Florida panthers from their tracks alone, using three simple rules: the animal’s sex from track size or stride, tracks known to be less than a day old, and how far apart the fresh tracks were. When they later caught panthers with hounds, their counts almost always matched.
2008Publisher link
Differential use of food and habitat by sympatric carnivores in the eastern Italian Alps
How do foxes, badgers and martens share an Alpine valley? By reading nearly 700 scats collected over two years in Italy’s Fiemme Valley, researchers found that all three lived mostly on fruit, yet each chose different berries, prey and habitats. Martens kept to the woods and the village, possibly to stay out of the way of foxes.
2008PDF available
Digital 3D modelling of dinosaur footprints by photogrammetry and laser scanning techniques: integrated approach at the Coste dell’Anglone tracksite (Lower Jurassic, Southern Alps, Northern Italy)
In the Early Jurassic, a theropod dinosaur walked across soft mud in what is now the Italian Alps. Researchers recorded one of their footprints in three ways: by hand in the field, with a laser scanner flown in by helicopter, and with a handful of photos from an ordinary camera. The photo-based 3D model matched the laser to within a millimetre and revealed claw traces the field team had not seen.
2008Publisher link
Distinguishing tracks of mink Mustela vison and polecat M. putorius
Mink and polecat tracks look almost the same, which is a real problem when rafts with clay pads are used to find and trap invasive mink in Britain, where polecats are protected. By measuring footprints from wild animals walking over clay, researchers found that three measurements, mostly about how widely the toes are spread, tell the two apart in more than nine cases out of ten.
2008Publisher link
Estimating the relative abundance of American mink Mustela vison on lowland rivers: evaluation and comparison of two techniques
How do you count an animal that is rarely seen? On six English rivers, researchers compared searching riverbanks for American mink scats with reading footprints left in clay on floating rafts. The rafts found mink more often, tracked the number of mink actually caught, and became cheaper over time, though telling mink tracks from polecat tracks remains a challenge.
2008PDF available
Evaluating bridge survey ability to detect river otter Lontra canadensis presence: a comparative study
Many otter surveys search the riverbank near bridges because they are easy to reach. Over four winters of reading otter tracks and scats in the snow in New Brunswick, Canada, researchers found that river otters do not avoid bridges, but that the usual 600 m search from a bridge would have found only about half of the otters known to be present.
2008PDF available
Evaluation of the importance of roe deer fawns in the spring–summer diet of red foxes in southeastern Norway
Red foxes kill about a quarter of radio-collared roe deer fawns each year in southeastern Norway, but how much do foxes depend on fawns? By analysing 171 fox scats, researchers found fawns turned up mostly in spring and far more often in scats at dens, where vixens carry large prey to their cubs. Over the summer, foxes switched to berries and beetles, suggesting fawns are an important but replaceable food.
2008Publisher link
Exploratory Use of Track and Camera Surveys of Mammalian Carnivores in the Peloncillo and Chiricahua Mountains of Southeastern Arizona
In Arizona’s sky island mountains, researchers spread gypsum powder on the ground and set cameras along animal trails to find out which carnivores live there. In just a few weeks they recorded gray foxes, coatis, ringtails, skunks, coyotes, cougars, bobcats and a black bear, with riparian forest along dry streambeds standing out as a wildlife hotspot. Footprints and photographs each caught species the other missed.
2008Publisher link
Feeding responses of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) to different wild rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) densities: a regional approach
Do red foxes live on rabbits, or just take them when they can? By counting rabbit droppings and picking apart 114 fox scats across central–southern Spain, researchers found that foxes ate many rabbits where rabbits were plentiful, but where rabbits were scarce they turned to a far more varied menu of small mammals, insects, birds and fruit. The pattern fits an opportunist that switches prey, not a rabbit specialist.
2008PDF available
Habitat Conditions Associated With Lynx Hunting Behavior During Winter in Northern Washington
How do you tell where a lynx is hunting? In the snowy forests of northern Washington, researchers followed 149 km of lynx trails and measured how much each one wound back and forth. The trails twisted most where snowshoe hares were plentiful and where chases and kills happened, showing that a trail’s shape can reveal good hunting habitat.
2008PDF available
Habitat Use, Food and the Importance of Poultry in the Diet of the Red Fox Vulpes vulpes in Extensive Farmland in Poland
What does a fox living among small farms and protected wetlands eat? By collecting more than 600 scats and searching for dens in western Poland, researchers found that voles came first but poultry was a big part of the diet, and foxes ate more of it the closer they lived to farm buildings. Eating chickens did not make the foxes take fewer wild birds.
2008PDF available
Indexing small mammalian carnivores in the southern Kalahari, South Africa
In the Kalahari, the wind wipes the dunes clean every day, leaving a fresh page for each night’s tracks. With a Khoisan tracker reading those tracks over four years, researchers monitored 10 small carnivore species across farms with increasing shrub encroachment, and found that counting each set of tracks, not just noting presence, revealed population changes, and even breeding success, that a simpler index missed.
2008Publisher link
Information transfer among widely spaced individuals: latrines as a basis for communication networks in the swift fox?
How do swift foxes keep in touch with neighbours they rarely meet? By mapping 580 latrines on Colorado’s short-grass prairie and filming foxes at them, researchers found that latrines cluster where neighbouring pairs’ ranges overlap and are reused year after year. Foxes mostly sniffed and urinated there, suggesting latrines work as message boards for the neighbourhood.
2008Publisher link
Last Interglacial fossil elephant trackways dated by OSL/AAR in coastal aeolianites, Still Bay, South Africa
About 140,000 years ago, elephants walked across the coastal dunes of South Africa’s southern Cape, and their footprints turned to stone. Reading these fossil trackways much as a tracker reads fresh ones, researchers found a well used game trail, a herd crossing, and two calves less than a year old walking side by side. They are the southernmost record of the African elephant so far, and hint at a wetter, more wooded coast than today.
2008Publisher link
Let’s Count Tigers: Census of Tiger and Leopard
For over 30 years, forest teams in Orissa, India, counted tigers and leopards by the footprints they left on specially laid dust pads. This chapter sets out how they did it, from telling a tiger cub from an adult leopard to sexing a tiger by the shape of their print, and compares the pugmark counts with the very different results of a newer camera-trap based method.
2008Publisher link
Models and Analysis of Animal Movements: From Individual Tracks to Mass Dispersal
How long does an animal keep heading the same way before it changes its mind? This dissertation builds tools to read behaviour from movement tracks, from a dugong in Western Australia and a fur seal on week-long foraging trips in Russia to young salmon running a gauntlet of predators. It shows that the scale at which a path loses its “memory” says a lot about how an animal is behaving.
2008Publisher link
Monitoring the small-scale distribution of sympatric European pine martens (Martes martes) and stone martens (Martes foina): a multievidence approach using faecal DNA analysis and camera-traps
Pine martens and stone martens leave scats that look the same, so how do you know which one lives in your forest? In a protected park in north-west Spain, researchers tested scats found along forest roads for DNA and set baited cameras that caught each marten’s throat patch. Both methods found only pine martens, living in well-preserved forest, and showed how scat surveys and cameras can work best together.
2008PDF available
Polarization of skull shapes in adult Lowland European bison, Bison bonasus bonasus
Do all European bison bulls have the same head? By measuring 300 museum skulls from Poland’s Białowieża Forest, researchers found that adult males come in two opposite shapes: long skulls with broad foreheads and narrow faces, or short skulls with narrow foreheads and broad faces. Females mostly share one shape, and the authors suggest the difference lies in the face and is possibly genetic.
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.