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.
2010Publisher link
Coarse-Scale Distribution Surveys and Occurrence Probability Modeling for Wolverine in Interior Alaska
Flying low over the snow in small aircraft, wildlife biologists searched 149 hexagons of Interior Alaska, each about the size of a male wolverine’s home range, for wolverine tracks. They found tracks in two thirds of them, mapped wolverines across 83% of the area, and showed that harvest records are a poor guide to where wolverines really live. Doubtful tracks were followed from the air until the wolverine’s tell-tale lope pattern confirmed them.
2010Publisher link
Effect of felling on red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and pine marten (Martes martes) diets in transitional mixed forest in Belarus
What happens to a fox’s dinner when the forest is clearcut? Analysing more than 3500 scats from two Belarusian forests, researchers found that heavy logging turned both red foxes and pine martens towards voles that thrive in the grassy clearcuts. The two predators, whose diets had been almost the same, began to go separate ways.
2010Publisher link
Effects of water level on sleeping-site selection and inter-group association in proboscis monkeys: why do they sleep alone inland on flooded days?
Proboscis monkeys are known for sleeping in trees on the riverbank, where a clouded leopard can only reach them from the land side. But when floods put the forest floor of a Bornean river forest under a metre of water, one group moved inland to sleep, and slept alone. The authors suggest that deep water keeps predators out, freeing the monkeys from their usual nightly retreat to the river.
2010Publisher link
Footwear Impression Evidence: Evaluation of Design and Physical Size of the Design
A size 9 boot and a size 9 trainer leave very different prints. In this slide presentation, two forensic footwear examiners explain how they decide whether a shoe could have made a crime scene impression, from the pattern of the sole to how the moulds were made, and why some prints hold too little detail to say either way.
2010PDF available
Habitat use by European wildcats (Felis silvestris) in central Spain: what is the relative importance of forest variables?
Are European wildcats really forest animals? By walking 101 km of trails in central Spain and counting wildcat scats, this study found wildcats in every habitat, including open cereal farmland, and most often in scrub and pasture mosaics with rabbits and water. No forest variable helped explain where they lived.
2010Publisher link
Individuals and populations: the role of long-term, individual-based studies of animals in ecology and evolutionary biology
Why does following the same animals for decades matter? Two leading field biologists show how long-term studies of known individuals, from red deer and Soay sheep to great tits and baboons, have revealed how animals age, breed, disperse and live together. They also show that the longest-running studies become the most productive, yet three-year grants make them hard to keep going.
2010PDF available
Morphometrics of the Tracks of Puma concolor: Is It Possible to Differentiate the Sexes Using Measurements from Captive Animals?
Can you tell a male puma from a female by their tracks alone? Researchers in Chile collected clay tracks from 8 zoo pumas and found that males leave larger tracks with a heel pad that is narrower in the middle. Their measurements sorted 88% of male tracks and all female tracks correctly, though the authors stress the method still needs testing on wild animals.
2010Publisher link
Relationship Between Fecal Pellet Counts and Snowshoe Hare Density in Western Wyoming
How many snowshoe hares live in a patch of forest? In western Wyoming, researchers counted hare droppings in small plots and live-trapped hares on 18 grids to turn pellet counts into hares per hectare. Plots cleared a year earlier gave far better estimates, and equations borrowed from other regions gave answers ranging from 0.14 to 5.63 hares/ha for the same count, showing why local calibration matters for lynx conservation.
2010PDF available
Remotely plucked hair genotyping: a reliable and non-invasive method for censusing pine marten (Martes martes, L. 1758) populations
How do you count an animal you almost never see? In two Irish plantation forests, researchers baited tubes on tree trunks so that pine martens left a few hairs on glue patches as they reached for the food. Even though Ireland’s martens have very little genetic variation, the hair DNA identified every individual and their sex, and matched the martens later caught in cage traps exactly.
2010Publisher link
Response of pit-building antlions to repeated unsuccessful encounters with prey
Does a near miss change how a hunter behaves? Researchers in Israel teased antlion larvae by dropping prey into their sand pits and snatching it away before they could eat. The antlions kept enlarging their pits as if they had fed, while unteased antlions slowed down, showing that even these tiny sit-and-wait predators read signs of prey in their surroundings and adjust.
2010Publisher link
River Otter Latrine Site Selection in Arid Habitats of Western Colorado, USA
Where would a river otter leave a message in the desert? Surveying 247 km of canyon rivers in western Colorado, researchers found that otters choose large prominent rocks beside deep water, shaded by cliffs and close to beaver sign, for their latrines. Their simple model can help anyone searching for otter signs in dry country.
2010Publisher link
Scrape-marking behavior of jaguars (Panthera onca) and pumas (Puma concolor)
Jaguars and pumas both rake the forest floor to leave scent messages, but who makes which scrape? In Belize, researchers matched more than a thousand scrapes along trails with camera-trap photographs and scat DNA. Male pumas turned out to be the busiest scrapers, puma scrapes were smaller and more often made with the hind feet, and scrapes clustered tightly where other cats had already marked.
2010Publisher link
Substrate and species constraints on the use of track incidences to estimate African large carnivore abundance
Can counting fresh tracks on dirt roads tell you how many lions, leopards, cheetahs and hyaenas live in an area? Across 18 sites from Namibia to the Serengeti, with trackers riding on the vehicle bonnet over 15 306 km, researchers found that on sandy soils one simple model fits all these large carnivores. Clay soils behave differently, and they show how many track finds a survey needs to be precise.
2010PDF available
Support for Indigenous wildlife management in Australia to enable sustainable use
Guns, vehicles and life in settled towns have changed how Indigenous Australians hunt, and some game animals such as emus, bustards and dugongs are under pressure. The authors argue that the right to hunt should go hand in hand with management, and describe kuka kanyini, a way of “looking after game animals” that blends elders’ knowledge with wildlife science, with tools such as CyberTracker helping non-literate trackers record data.
2010PDF available
The Literacy of Tracking: A comparative analysis of tracking within two Bushman post-hunter communities
Is reading tracks like reading a book? A cultural studies student went tracking with two Kalahari Bushman communities, the ≠Khomani in South Africa and the !Xoo in Botswana, and found tracking alive but changing. The !Xoo read each other’s shoe treads to know where their children have gone, while the ≠Khomani turn tracking into a living from tourists who want an “authentic” Bushman experience.
2010Publisher link
The accuracy of scat identification in distribution surveys: American mink, Neovison vison, in the northern highlands of Scotland
Experienced surveyors recorded mink or “possible mink” scats at 57 of 147 sites across the northern highlands of Scotland, enough to suggest a widespread invasive population. Then DNA tests showed that not one of the 45 scats tested came from a mink: most were pine marten and fox. A sobering lesson in how much the local mix of species matters when reading scats.
2010PDF available
The shrinking ark: patterns of large mammal extinctions in India
Where have India’s tigers, lions, rhinos and wild buffalo gone? By matching more than 30 000 old hunting, museum and taxidermy records against what over 100 wildlife experts see today, researchers estimated how often 25 large mammals have vanished from places where they once lived. Protected areas, forest, high ground and people’s tolerance of wildlife all helped some species hold on.
2010PDF available
Tigers on trails: occupancy modeling for cluster sampling
Tigers walk forest trails and leave a string of tracks and scats along them, so signs found on one stretch of trail are not independent of the next. Using a large tiger survey in southwestern India, the authors show that standard occupancy models can underestimate a species’ range by about 30% on trail surveys, and offer a new model that turns this trail behaviour into an advantage.
2010PDF available
Tracking Knowledge: Science, Tracking, and Technology
What do trackers bring to a conservation survey that never shows up in the data? Spending 2009 with twelve CyberTracker trackers in Botswana’s Western Kgalagadi corridor, an anthropologist describes how the elder trackers read spoor with their whole bodies, speak of animals as neighbours, and proudly call themselves “Cybertrackers”, while asking where all their data go.
2010PDF available
Traditional Versus Multivariate Methods for Identifying Jaguar, Puma, and Large Canid Tracks
Is that a jaguar, a puma or a big dog? Using 167 tracks of known animals from 18 zoos, researchers found that people who felt confident identifying these tracks scored anywhere from 37% to 87%, and most published measurement rules got more than one in five wrong. Their new measurement-based keys and models told cats from canids, and jaguars from pumas, with over 95% accuracy on test tracks.
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.