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.
2005Publisher link
Estimating larger carnivore numbers from track counts and measurements
How many leopards, caracals and brown hyaenas share a small game ranch in South Africa’s Waterberg? Reading 283 tracks on sand roads over six months, two researchers compared three ways of estimating carnivore numbers from tracks, from a subjective comparison of track measurements to formal statistics, and found that all three gave similar answers.
2005Publisher link
How Far Do Animals Go? Determinants of Day Range in Mammals
How far does an animal travel in a day, and why? Comparing 200 mammal species, the authors show that bigger animals travel farther, but not in proportion to their size, and that meat and insect eaters travel almost three times as far as plant-eaters of the same size. A simple model based on food needs and how food is spread out explains much of the pattern.
2005Publisher link
Identification of individual tigers (Panthera tigris) from their pugmarks
Can you tell one tiger from another by their footprints alone? Working with pugmarks of 19 known tigers in India, researchers found that nine footprint measurements plus stride and straddle sorted every set of tracks to the right tiger. They also showed that soil depth can make one tigress look like several animals, and recommend at least 10 pugmarks per trail and soil 0.5 to 1 cm deep.
2005PDF available
Indexing principles and a widely applicable paradigm for indexing animal populations
How do you tell whether an animal population is rising or falling without counting every animal? This paper sets out what makes a good population index, and a simple, widely usable way to build one from repeated counts at tracking plots, tracking tiles, chew cards and other stations. A worked example counts dingo tracks on 50 dirt-road plots over four days in Queensland, Australia.
2005PDF available
Landscape-related differences in diet, food supply and distribution pattern of the pine marten, Martes martes in the transitional mixed forest of northern Belarus
Same forest zone, different soil, very different pine martens. Over twenty winters of track counts, snowtracking and more than 1200 scats in northern Belarus showed that martens on rich clay soils lived at about six times the density of those on poor sandy soils, where they turned to ungulate carrion in winter and berries in summer. In both places, the number of bank voles in autumn set how many martens there were by late winter.
2005PDF available
Local feeding specialization of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) in response to eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) introduction (NW Italy)
What does a generalist eat when a new prey moves in? After American eastern cottontails spread into a nature reserve on Italy’s River Po, scats showed that red foxes there became cottontail specialists: lagomorphs rose from about a quarter of fox scats to three quarters, and the foxes’ diet narrowed by half. As a bonus, foxes and badgers now overlap far less in what they eat.
2005Publisher link
Markings as Indicator of Snow Leopard in Field Survey, in Xinjiang
How do you study a cat you almost never see? In the mountains of Xinjiang, China, survey teams walked 67 transects and found 118 snow leopard signs, from footprints in the snow and clusters of up to 20 scrapes to scent spray on rock walls and yak carcasses. The signs showed where snow leopards still live, which terrain they favour, and how herder conflict and lost prey have emptied parts of their range.
2005Publisher link
Measures of dung bolus size for known-age African elephants (Loxodonta africana): implications for age estimation
Can elephant dung tell you an elephant’s age? Measuring dung from known-age elephants in Amboseli, Kenya, showed that bolus diameter grows with age like shoulder height and foot length, levelling off at about 35 years in females and 55 in males. It works best for young elephants.
2005Publisher link
Molecular testing of observer identification of carnivore feces in the field
How sure can you be that a scat came from a coyote and not a fox, wolf or lynx? In Alaska, researchers rated their certainty for each scat they picked up, then checked it with DNA. Every scat they called “100% certain”, always one with fresh coyote tracks beside it, really was from a coyote, and their ratings matched the DNA results closely at every level.
2005Publisher link
Scat removal: a source of bias in feces-related studies
Scats are a favourite tool for studying what carnivores eat, but what if the evidence gets eaten first? On a Kansas army base, researchers set bobcat and coyote scats on sifted tracking plots and read the tracks every day. Up to half the scats vanished within days in summer, mostly where opossums had visited, and others were buried, dug over, cached by a woodrat or washed away by rain.
2005Publisher link
Snow-tracking versus radiotelemetry for predicting wolf-environment relationships in the Rocky Mountains of Canada
Can wolf tracks in the snow tell researchers as much as radio collars? In the Canadian Rockies, a model built only from wolf road crossings and transect tracks predicted where collared wolves went 78% of the time. The authors conclude that snow-tracking is a reliable, low-cost and non-invasive way to map where wolves live, while telemetry still tells us things tracks cannot.
2005Publisher link
Spatial decomposition of predation risk using resource selection functions: an example in a wolf–elk predator–prey system
Is an elk in danger simply wherever wolves roam? By following wolf trails for about 1250 km in the snow around Banff National Park, researchers mapped where wolves crossed elk tracks and where elk were actually killed. Wolves mostly found elk in valley bottoms, but pine forest made elk easier to kill once found, while grasslands helped them escape.
2005PDF available
The role of vocal individuality in conservation
Every bittern’s boom is a little different. This review explains how researchers can recognise individual animals by their calls, without ever catching them, and how doing so revealed that a corncrake population had been undercounted by up to 30% and that roaming bitterns had been counted twice. It also sets out the pitfalls, from voices that change over the years to quiet females.
2005Publisher link
Using faecal pellet counts along transects to estimate quokka (Setonix brachyurus) population density
Quokkas are famously hard to trap, so how do you count them in thick swamp? In Western Australia’s jarrah forest, researchers counted fresh scats along the narrow runways only quokkas make, and found the counts closely matched population numbers from years of trapping. Where foxes went uncontrolled, though, quokkas stayed in the swamps and left more scats, a reminder that behaviour shapes what signs tell us.
2005Publisher link
Winter distribution of European pine marten (Martes martes) scats in a protected area of Galicia, Spain
How do you learn where an elusive forest carnivore spends the winter? By walking 140 transects through a snowy Spanish natural park and mapping every pine marten scat. The scats clustered in deciduous and mature pine forest, near rocks and streams, and lower down, pointing to places that offer food and shelter.
2004PDF available
A Snow-tracking Protocol Used to Delineate Local Lynx, Lynx canadensis, Distributions
When should you go looking for lynx tracks? Not the morning after fresh snow, according to this simulation: a survey a week after snowfall was over three times as likely to cross a lynx trail. In Montana, snow-track surveys mapped the same lynx range as radio collars, and in Wyoming the team followed doubtful, wind-scoured tracks to daybeds and confirmed them as lynx from hairs frozen in the snow.
2004Publisher link
A change of diet from rodents to rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus). Is the wildcat (Felis silvestris) a specialist predator?
Are wildcats rodent specialists? By collecting 239 wildcat scats across central Spain, researchers found that where rabbits live, wildcats switch to them, especially in summer, and rodents drop from 82% to 41% of scats. Wildcats turn out to be flexible hunters that eat what the land offers.
2004Publisher link
A review of potential techniques for identifying individual stoats (Mustela erminea) visiting control or monitoring stations
Can you tell one stoat from another by the prints they leave in a tracking tunnel? This review of ways to identify individual stoats at bait and monitoring stations weighs footprints, DNA from hair, microchips, radio loggers and bait dyes. Footprints are the cheapest option, but standard tunnels rarely record enough detail; the authors call for better print recording and see a bait dye that shows up in whiskers as the most practical choice for now.
2004Publisher link
Aging through growth marks in teeth of Spanish red deer
Deer teeth carry growth rings, much like trees. Researchers in Spain counted the marks in 141 red deer teeth and found that the first lower molar gave the most reliable age, while canines were no help at all. It is a useful look at what a tooth from a skull or a kill site can really reveal.
2004PDF available
Beyond leopards: tooth marks and the contribution of multiple carnivore taxa to the accumulation of the Swartkrans Member 3 fossil assemblage
Did leopards drag almost every carcass into the caves where early human fossils are found? By measuring tiny tooth pits on million-year-old bones from Swartkrans Cave in South Africa, researchers found a leopard-sized signature on small animals but bigger, heavier bite marks on large ones, pointing to hyenas, lions or large canids. The bones themselves tell the story better than modern analogies alone.
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.