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
Marcelo Aranda: Memorias sobre un naturalista
Marcelo Aranda taught generations of Mexican biologists to read tracks and signs. He made his first pocket track guide at 13, and his plaster casts now sit in Mexico’s National Mammal Collection. In this memorial book, his family, friends and students share stories of field days, jaguar tracks and patient teaching, right up to his last weeks.
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.
2026PDF available
XTrail-ID: An Explainable AI Human Footprint Trail Identification on Soil Substrate Using Unsupervised Machine Learning from UAV Imagery
Can a computer tell how many people walked across the ground from drone photos of their bare tracks? In Botswana, XTrail-ID grouped barefoot tracks into each person’s trail with 94% accuracy and showed heatmaps of the parts of each track it relied on. Expert trackers checked the results.
2025Publisher link
Bobcats select young forests and avoid clear-cut and mature forests in a timber-logged landscape
Do bobcats like logged forests? GPS-collared bobcats on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula avoided fresh clear-cuts and older forest, but favoured young regenerating stands 6 to 15 years old, where prey are likely plentiful. Their choice of cover peaked at about two-thirds canopy cover.
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.
2024Publisher link
Disruption of an ant-plant mutualism shapes interactions between lions and their primary prey
A tiny invasive ant is changing how lions hunt in Kenya. By killing the native ants that protect whistling-thorn trees, it lets elephants open up the savanna, leaving lions less cover to ambush zebra. Lions have not declined, but their kills have shifted towards buffalo.
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.
2024Publisher link
Puma (Puma concolor) modifications on medium-sized mammals: Can its taphonomic signature be differentiated from other South American carnivores?
What do a puma’s leftovers look like? Researchers in Argentina fed rabbits to two captive pumas and studied every bone left behind. The pumas left mostly skulls and lower leg bones, heavily broken and tooth-marked, a pattern very like that of foxes and wild cats, though the puma’s tooth punctures could be larger.
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.
2021PDF available
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.
2021Publisher link
Functional, temporal and spatial complementarity in mammal-fungal spore networks enhances mycorrhizal dispersal following forest harvesting
When a patch of forest is logged, who brings the tree-root fungi back? In New Hampshire, researchers counted spores in the scat of seven small mammal species and found that many species share the job of spreading one kind of fungus, while one vole species does almost all the work for another. Where these small animals choose to travel, under fallen wood or through regrowth, may decide where young trees find their fungal partners.
2021PDF available
Lasso locomotion expands the climbing repertoire of snakes
For nearly a century, snakes were said to move in four ways. Researchers filming invasive brown treesnakes found a fifth: the snake throws a loop of its body around a smooth pole, like a lasso, and inches upward with small bends along the loop. It is slow, hard work, but it lets them climb poles more than twice as wide as was thought possible.
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 tracks to tracking subatomic particles, tracking may be the one metaphor that fits all of science.
2020PDF available
Long Limbless Locomotors Over Land: The Mechanics and Biology of Elongate, Limbless Vertebrate Locomotion
About one in five land vertebrates has no legs, yet these animals get less than half a percent of locomotion research. This short introduction to the first ever symposium on limbless locomotion shows how snakes, legless lizards and even eels slither, sidewind and inch through sand, clutter, tunnels and trees, and why so much about their movement is still unknown.
2020PDF available
Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
Every rhinoceros has its own pattern of cracks on the soles of their feet. On three private properties in Namibia, researchers and local trackers tested three ways of counting black and white rhinoceroses from their footprints. Matching footprints to sightings found every known animal, while the faster photograph-only methods occasionally counted one trail as an extra rhinoceros.
2020PDF available
Running in Tarahumara (Rarámuri) Culture: Persistence Hunting, Footracing, Dancing, Work, and the Fallacy of the Athletic Savage
How did Tarahumara (Rarámuri) hunters in Mexico run down deer on foot? Elders who took part in the last persistence hunts describe reading a tiring deer from smaller, worn hoof prints and blood in the tracks, and driving deer through ravines onto hidden stakes. The authors argue that Tarahumara running comes from hard work, community and prayer, not a mythical “athletic savage.”
2020PDF available
The curse of observer experience: Error in noninvasive genetic sampling
Does experience make you better at finding and identifying wolf scat? Over seven summers in Idaho, Yellowstone and Alberta, DNA tests on 4,836 scats showed that first-year field crews collected more scats than returning crew members and were at least as good at telling wolf scat from that of coyotes and other carnivores. Individual accuracy ranged from 20% to 90%, a reminder that experience and tested skill are not the same thing.
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.