One Footprint at a Time: Advancing Ethical Wildlife Monitoring with Faunalytics
Here’s something WildTrack is excited to share—the latest “Tracking Without a Trace” blog on Faunalytics is live! The article explores how footprints could revolutionize wildlife monitoring. If you want to learn where animals go, how many exist, and how their populations change, you don’t need complex hardware or huge budgets. Invasive techniques—like trapping, handling, or instrumenting animals with transmitters and GPS collars—aren’t just costly; they can cause stress, alter animal behavior, and sometimes yield unreliable data.
Our technology can tell us this footprint was made by a male African lion named ‘Rocket’
That’s why WildTrack believes in non-invasive approaches, and we’re honoured to have the opportunity to share this with like-minded partners like Faunalytics, who believe that animal welfare and honest, high-quality science go hand in hand. This piece shines a light on how technologies like WildTrack’s Footprint Identification Technology (FIT), based on JMP software, combine age-old tracking skills with new machine learning magic. It’s a collaborative effort, calling in community science, indigenous knowledge, and some clever algorithms, all working together to paint a clearer, kinder picture of wildlife populations. But here’s the heart of it: WildTrack wants the whole conservation community—and anyone interested in real change—to think about our five core ethical principles for monitoring. First, always use the gentlest method possible; non-invasive is the way forward. Second, care about the individual animals behind every data point; they matter just as much as the bigger population stats. Third, don’t forget to follow up once the study is done—check in to make sure interventions were truly not harming animals or disrupting their social groups in any way. Fourth, invite local communities and expert trackers in; their knowledge is gold. And fifth, embrace a multi-disciplinary approach – The best conservation solutions integrate biology, data science, AI, and traditional knowledge for a holistic approach to biodiversity protection. Imagine the impact if everyone who visited a park just stopped to snap a picture of a footprint—it could totally democratize conservation, making it accessible to everyone. Thanks to Faunalytics for giving WildTrack a chance to share this message. Join us—whether as trackers, data reviewers, engineers, or citizen scientists—to build a global, ethical wildlife monitoring movement, one footprint at a time
