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.
2020PDF available
What Defines Different Modes of Snake Locomotion?
For decades, snakes were said to move in just four ways. Drawing on recordings of snakes’ muscles as they swim, sidewind, climb branches and cross gaps between them, this review argues for at least 11 distinct ways of moving. It also describes the separate, slanted tracks of sidewinding, and asks whether drag marks between them change what we call it.
2020PDF available
What We Can Learn from CyberTracking: Applications of an International Tracker Evaluation System for Professional and Citizen Science, and the Theory of Original Wisdom
How do we know whether a tracker's data can be trusted? Kersey Lawrence reviewed 421 scientific papers, tested CyberTracker certified trackers against camera traps, and interviewed 38 trackers from three cultures. She found that only 7% of the papers gave evidence of observer skill, that higher certified trackers were more accurate, and that time spent tracking matters more than background.
2019PDF available
Botswana’s wildlife losing ground as Kalahari Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) are dezoned for livestock expansion
From the air, Botswana’s dezoned Kalahari wildlife areas looked almost empty, with no carnivores seen at all. On the ground, local trackers counting tracks along sand roads told a different story: nearly 3,900 large herbivores and around 50 large carnivores, including leopards, cheetahs, brown hyaenas and wild dogs, living in land set aside for cattle ranches. The authors call for trackers’ ground surveys to inform decisions before wild land is given up.
2019PDF available
Comparing the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of sampling methods for estimating population abundance and density of a recovering carnivore: the European pine marten (Martes martes)
What is the best way to count a shy forest carnivore? In a Scottish conifer plantation, researchers compared live traps, baited hair tubes and scats collected by surveyors along forest tracks, using DNA to identify each pine marten. Scat collection was by far the cheapest and found females the other methods missed, and combining scats with hair tubes found 81% of the known martens with no need for traps.
2019Publisher link
Defining the morphological quality of fossil footprints. Problems and principles of preservation in tetrapod ichnology with examples from the Palaeozoic to the present
How sure can anyone be about a footprint left millions of years ago? Eleven fossil-footprint specialists propose a simple 0 to 3 scale for how faithfully a track shows the foot that made it, and test it on tracks from early amphibians and dinosaurs to a Pleistocene canid and modern human footprints. Along the way they show how wet ground, dragging toes and mud cracks can fool the eye, and why some named fossil tracks should be set aside.
2019Publisher link
Effectiveness and Accuracy of Track Tubes for Detecting Small-Mammal Species Occupancy in Southeastern Herbaceous Wetlands and Meadows
Can a length of rain gutter, some lantern soot and sticky paper replace a live trap? At 37 meadow sites in Alabama and Tennessee, track tubes found mice and rats about as well as live traps, but only when uncertain track identifications were handled carefully. The authors recommend that track identification be overseen by an experienced tracker and that studies report trackers’ certification levels.
2019PDF available
Lions (Panthera leo) specialising on a marine diet in the Skeleton Coast National Park, Namibia
On Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, three young lionesses who lost their mother learned to swim to an island to catch roosting cormorants, and then to hunt Cape fur seals on the beach. Over 18 months, the sea supplied most of their food. Using collars, night observation and spoor reconstructions, this study tells how desert lions regained a way of life lost when the coast’s lions were killed in the 1980s.
2019Publisher link
Pumas as Ecosystem Engineers: Ungulate Carcasses Support Beetle Assemblages in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
What does a puma leave behind besides tracks? In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, researchers trapped more than 24,000 beetles of 215 species at puma kills and nearby control sites. Each puma left about 38 kg of carrion a week, and the carcasses became busy beetle habitat for about two months, leading the authors to call pumas ecosystem engineers.
2019Publisher link
Sampling bias in snow leopard population estimation studies
How many snow leopards are there? This review of every published camera trap and scat DNA study found that they cover less than 1% of the cat’s range, in only half of its countries. Because researchers tend to survey small areas in the best snow leopard habitat, densities may have been overestimated by up to five times.
2019PDF available
Terrestrial locomotion of the Svalbard rock ptarmigan: comparing field and laboratory treadmill studies
Do birds move the same way on a treadmill as they do in the wild? Filming wild ptarmigan on the snows of Svalbard, researchers found that walking and full running matched the lab, but on slippery snow the birds switched to an in-between gait with shorter, quicker steps. Wild birds also ran 1.4 times faster than on the treadmill.
2019PDF available
The Pleistocene fauna of the Cape south coast revealed through ichnology at two localities
More than 100,000 years ago, elephants, a rhinoceros, an extinct long-horned buffalo and a giant horse walked across dunes on South Africa’s Cape south coast. Their footprints, now in fallen blocks of rock at the foot of sea cliffs, include the first fossil elephant tracks known from South Africa and probably the first fossil rhinoceros and giant Cape horse tracks. One of the rocks has since slid into the ocean, a reminder of how quickly such sites can vanish.
2019Publisher link
The functional role of scent marking in the social organization of large sympatric neotropical felids
In a Belizean rainforest, pumas and jaguars share the same trails but leave very different messages. By walking the trails for scrapes and filming the busiest marking spots, researchers found that a few resident male pumas made most of the scrapes and scraped even more when rivals or females had passed by, while jaguars mostly sprayed and left little to see. Peccaries, ocelots and even a tayra stopped to check the big cats’ marks.
2019PDF available
The locomotor kinematics and ground reaction forces of walking giraffes
Do giraffes really pace? By burying force plates under the sand of a zoo enclosure and filming three giraffes walking over them, researchers found that giraffes use an ordinary lateral sequence walk, never a true pace, and speed up mainly by taking longer strides. Their long neck swings twice in every stride, partly cancelling the body’s surges like a skilled jockey.
2019Publisher link
The role of den quality in giant panda conservation
Giant panda cubs are born almost naked, so where their mother raises them matters. In a Chinese reserve with old-growth forest, mothers chose roomy, well-hidden tree hollows with relatively narrow entrances, and these dens stayed warmer, drier and steadier than the air outside, and than rock caves used in a logged reserve. The authors suggest that protecting large old trees could help pandas raise more cubs.
2019PDF available
The running kinematics of free-roaming giraffes, measured using a low cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
How do you study a running giraffe you cannot catch? Researchers in South Africa’s Free State Province filmed free-roaming giraffes with a low-cost drone and found that they never trot or pace: they go straight from a walk to a “slow gallop”, always keeping at least one foot on the ground. The study also shows how to get the most accurate measurements from drone video.
2019PDF available
Track surveys do not provide accurate or precise lion density estimates in Serengeti
Counting lion tracks along roads is a cheap, popular way to estimate lion numbers, but does it work? In Tanzania’s Serengeti, trackers on vehicle bonnets read lion tracks on freshly cleared roads for 13 weeks, and the standard formula turned their counts into close to three times as many lions as an independent call-in survey found. Week-to-week swings were bigger than the change between years, and the authors urge caution before using track surveys to set lion conservation policy.
2019Publisher link
Using the Formozov–Malyshev–Pereleshin formula to convert mammal spoor counts into density estimates for long-term community-level monitoring
Every September, community trackers in Namibia’s Salambala Conservancy walk 215 km of transects counting spoor. Using a Russian formula that divides track counts by how far each species travels in a day, researchers turned seven years of these counts into density estimates for 10 mammals, more species than the conservancy’s sighting surveys could manage. The catch: the formula needs every spoor crossing recorded, and good day ranges, which trackers trailing animals could help provide.
2018PDF available
Are pumas subordinate carnivores, and does it matter?
Is the puma top cat, or the underdog? Reviewing 64 sources, the authors found that wolves, grizzly bears, black bears and jaguars generally get the better of pumas, while pumas dominate coyotes, maned wolves and smaller cats. Pumas live alongside at least one dominant competitor across nearly half their range, which raises the question of how competition and human hunting together affect them.
2018Publisher link
Beyond the Shadow of a Desert: Aquatic Resource Intensification on the Roof of Southern Africa
When the climate turned cold in Lesotho’s mountains, ancient hunter-gatherers went fishing. Fish bones from three sites spanning 30,000 years show catches peaking in each cold period, timed to the spawning runs of yellowfish and mudfish. The authors argue Africa’s past held ways of life never seen in the Kalahari.
2018PDF available
Can trackers count free-ranging wildlife as effectively and efficiently as conventional aerial survey and distance sampling? Implications for citizen science in the Kalahari, Botswana
Can trackers count wildlife as well as an aeroplane? In Botswana's Kalahari, trackers from Zutshwa counted nearly 20,000 track sets along the same transects flown by the national aerial survey. Their estimates for large grazers matched both aerial and ground counts, they counted all six large carnivores, and their survey cost 40% less than the aerial survey.
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.