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.
2007PDF available
Using sign at power poles to document presence of bears in Greece
In northern Greece, brown bears have taken to sniffing, rubbing, biting and clawing wooden power poles. By checking poles every month for a year, researchers found these signs far outnumber tracks and scats and last much longer, and they wrote a guide to ageing hair and bite marks. A strand of barbed wire on each pole also collects bear hair for genetic study.
2007PDF available
Using spoor to determine the age and weight of subadult black rhinoceroses (Diceros bicornis L.)
Can a footprint tell you how old and how heavy a young rhinoceros is? In Zimbabwe’s Matusadona National Park, seven young black rhinoceroses were regularly weighed and their back footprints measured over nearly three years. Print length predicted both age and weight well, offering a way to monitor young rhinoceroses without seeing them and to judge drug doses before darting.
2007Publisher link
Variation in the diet composition of a generalist predator, the red fox, in relation to season and density of main prey
What does a fox eat when the voles crash? Over 13 years of snow-tracking in western Finland, researchers collected fox scats and found that voles were the staple, closely following vole numbers in the fields, while hares, grouse and even stoats and weasels stayed on the menu whatever the vole year.
2006Publisher link
A Comparison of Animal Jaws and Bite Mark Patterns
Could you tell a bobcat bite from a coyote bite? Forensic dentists measured 486 museum skulls of 12 North American carnivores and pressed their teeth into foam to record their bite patterns. Cats bite with their front teeth in a straight line, dogs with a deep curve, and bears and wolverines fall in between, while the spacing of the canines helps separate species of different sizes.
2006Publisher link
A Comparison of Noninvasive Techniques to Survey Carnivore Communities in Northeastern North America
Which works better for finding carnivores: cameras, track plates, scat or fresh snow? In New York’s forests, cameras rarely caught wary coyotes, while scats on the trails and tracks in fresh snow revealed them at far more sites. No single method found every species, so the authors recommend combining several.
2006Publisher link
A Technique to Capture, Analyze, and Quantify Anterior Teeth Rotations for Application in Court Cases Involving Tooth Marks
Every front tooth sits at a slight twist, and that twist shows up in a bite mark. Forensic dentists in South Africa measured the twist of each front tooth in 300 volunteers and worked out which angles are common and which are rare, so that a rare feature in a bite mark can be given the weight it deserves in court. Like reading a track, it is all about knowing how unusual a feature really is.
2006Publisher link
An Experimentally Determined Persistence-Rate Correction Factor for Scat-Based Abundance Indices
Fewer droppings does not always mean fewer animals. In the monsoon forests of northern Thailand, a researcher laid out piles of fresh sambar pellets and found that the share still visible three months later varied widely between sites. Correcting scat counts for this changed which sites appeared to hold the most sambar.
2006PDF available
Are We Gathering Reliable Data? The Need for Measuring Observer Skill in Wildlife Monitoring
How good are wildlife survey crews at reading tracks? When 19 Texas Parks and Wildlife staff took the CyberTracker Track and Sign Interpretation Evaluation, their average score was 62%. Three months later it was 79%, and most had expected to do far better the first time. This thesis argues that measuring observer skill is both a check on data quality and a powerful way to train.
2006PDF available
Assessing the viability of tiger subpopulations in a fragmented landscape
How do you count tigers across 36,000 km² of Sumatran forest? Teams walked trails and ridges looking for tiger tracks and droppings, then camera traps and computer models showed that roads have split the tigers into four groups, three of them small. Keeping those groups connected and free of poaching could decide whether they survive.
2006PDF available
Clouded leopards, the secretive top-carnivore of South-East Asian rainforests: their distribution, status and conservation needs in Sabah, Malaysia
How do you count a cat that almost nobody ever sees? In the rainforest of Sabah, Malaysia, researchers photographed and measured clouded leopard footprints, told four individual cats apart, and estimated about nine clouded leopards per 100 km², far fewer than the figure that had been quoted for years. Their rough count for the whole of Sabah suggests most of these cats live in logged commercial forests, not in fully protected reserves.
2006PDF available
Comparing simple methods for ageing roe deer Capreolus capreolus: are any of them useful for management?
How old is that deer? Using 158 roe deer from southern Norway, researchers tested three simple ageing methods against tooth sectioning: how worn the molars are, how heavy the eye lenses are, and how thick the antler bases are. None was precise, but simply measuring molar height gave an age within a year about 70% of the time for deer up to four years old.
2006PDF available
Cost and efficiency of large mammal census techniques: comparison of methods for a participatory approach in a communal area, Zimbabwe
Is an aircraft or a bicycle the better way to count elephants? In a communal area of Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley, local agents on bicycles and on foot saw far more animals for far less money than cars or aircraft: about US$1 per elephant seen, against US$18 from the air and over US$38 from a car. Quiet, slow observers got closer to wary wildlife in thick bush.
2006PDF available
Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24, MCWP 3-33.5)
“Read the map like a book” and “take the time to learn what normalcy looks like”: the 2006 US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual asks soldiers to know their ground and their surroundings in depth. Alongside its doctrine on insurgency, it explains how situational awareness is built on foot and over time, and how to navigate towns with no address system.
2006PDF available
DNA Analysis of Hair and Scat Collected Along Snow Tracks to Document the Presence of Canada Lynx
Can a lynx track in the snow lead you to proof the animal was there? Following tracks in Washington, Montana and Minnesota, researchers collected hairs from beds and scats along the trail, and DNA confirmed lynx in nearly every usable sample. Their numbers suggest that following a lynx track for about 4 km gives a better than 95% chance of collecting usable lynx DNA.
2006Publisher link
Diets of Free-Ranging Mexican Gray Wolves in Arizona and New Mexico
What do wolves eat when they return to a landscape after 40 years away? By picking apart 251 scats from reintroduced Mexican gray wolves in Arizona and New Mexico, researchers found the wolves lived mainly on elk, with cattle making up only a small part of their diet. The authors suggest elk that had never met wolves may have been easy prey.
2006Publisher link
Dynamic Appearance Modeling for Human Tracking
How can a computer keep following a person who walks behind a tree? Engineers built a video system that learns, from just a few frames, how a person’s appearance changes with each stride and where they are heading. It predicts the person while they are out of sight and finds them again afterwards, even when people cross paths or the camera moves.
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.
2006PDF available
Evaluation of sign surveys and trappability of American mink: management consequences
How do you count an animal that avoids your traps? On the sandy riverbanks of northern Spain, researchers compared track surveys, live-traps and radio collars on invasive American mink. Tracks around the cages revealed minks that visited or set off traps without being caught, while radio collars showed females hiding in tiny bramble-covered streams where neither tracks nor traps found them.
2006Publisher link
Feeding habits and trophic niche overlap between sympatric golden jackal (Canis aureus) and red fox (Vulpes vulpes) in the Pannonian ecoregion (Hungary)
Golden jackals are moving back into Hungary, where red foxes had the field to themselves. Four years of scats showed that both live mainly on voles, but when a hard winter made voles scarce, jackals turned to wild boar piglets and carcasses while foxes turned to fruit and birds. The newcomer turned out to be the pickier eater.
2006PDF available
Foraging and Feeding Ecology of the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus): Lessons from Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA
What does a wolf pack eat, and in what order? Ten years after wolves returned to Yellowstone, researchers found they mostly kill elk, choosing calves, old cows and weakened bulls, and eat the organs first and the bone and hide last. One lone wolf went 10 weeks without making a kill, getting by on carcasses up to 4 months old.
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.