Symposium

Sören Decraene

Sören Decraene: A Belgian wildlife enthusiast living in Sweden since 2021. I am passionate about wildlife tracking and nature photography and filming, and I like to combine my veterinary knowledge with the things I learn in tracking and on the other side using the knowledge from tracking to get closer to the animals I want to observe/photograph. I have a professional level in Track and Sign and a level 2 in Trailing in the cyber tracker system and I want to help build the Cybertracker community in the Nordic countries. He has kindly agreed to deliver three separate session on three subject areas

Skulls and Bones: covering both mammals and birds: In this session we will go over the anatomy of bones and how to recognize the bones found in the woods both of mammals and birds. The aim is to get a better understanding of the animal body and why bones look the way they look. Going over the most common species in Europe and the ID-features so you can easily determine which animal skull you have found out in nature.

Basic Tracking: A practical introduction to animal tracks. This is a hand-on workshop based on the cyber tracker system where we will go out into nature and look at tracks and explain the basics on how to determine which animal left the track and why. Bring a notebook and something to write!

Digestion and poop morphology: A theoretical overview of why poop looks like it does. Starting at the mouth en the dentition we will then move on to digestive systems and in the end discuss why an animals poop looks the way it does.

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Paul Wernicke

Paul Wernicke: In 2011 I stumbled upon a large dog-like track for the first time and wanted to know if it was a wolf or a domestic dog. Since that day, my fascination with wolves has never left me. Their tracks and signs captivated me. It was the beginning of a long journey together through the vastness of the Hoher Fläming Nature Park. Endless questions, deep insights into their often hidden lives and an ever-growing connection to the wolves on my doorstep.

Wolves divide our society like no other animal species, into people who love them and people who hate them and of course into people who use the facets that lie between these two extremes. Some hear the ancient “call of the wild”. Others feel their existence is threatened.

Since 2012, my good friend Greg, I and many other tracker friends have been following the tracks of the wolves with the question of who these creatures really are?

We observed how the animals make themselves at home in our densely populated cultural landscape, 150 years after they were deliberately exterminated by us humans.

We primarily use the art of tracking. That means endless hours in the forest on a never-ending search for answers. website

Details To come:

Dan Puplett

Dan Puplett: is a naturalist, conservationist and nature educator. He has Professional certificate (Level 4) certificate in Track & Sign and a Level 3 in Trailing. He is the author of the Field Studies Council British Bird Tracks & Signs guide and the new British Mammal Tracks & Signs guide. Dan teaches tracking and naturalist skills to a wide audience, including conservation professionals. He is a nature guide and has also contributed to a range of rewilding projects and tracking-based wildlife surveys. www.danpuplett.co.uk

Bird Language and Tracking: Learning bird language is the art of interpreting the calls and behaviour of birds and other wildlife. It is an essential part of tracking and can reveal a huge amount about the location of animals, other activity in the wider ecosystem and even about our presence on the landscape. In this session we will learn some of the main principles of studying bird language, put them into practice and explore how we can take this skill further.

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Diliana Welink

Francis Collie

Francis Collie: Francis is a CT certified tracker living in the woods by the Valley of Mankind, Dordogne (France), famous for the multitude of its prehistoric rock-art caves. In 2014, he founds the French tracking association Je Suis La Piste to share his passion and connect with various First Nations’ people. He has also created tracker intervention-group Périgord Pistage and is co-founder of national association France Pistage.

Sign language for Trackers : This intuitive and stealthy communication system opens up new ways of walking in the wild for groups of Trackers.
Walking in silence allows to broaden our senses, deepens our connection with the territory, and increases chances of meeting wildlife… but this experience is difficult to access for (noisy) groups. “Sign language for Trackers” gives the keys to enjoy these highlights !

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Oded Davidovich

Oded: has been practicing and teaching Tracking for more than 15 years in Israel, South Africa, Turkey and Belgium. He introduced both children and adults to tracking, and have trained professional trackers and field rangers.
A professional tracker from the Cybertracker organisation and a specialist in Track and Sign from SA.

Gaits and Beyond: This workshop will be on Animals gaits and behavior interpretation from the gaits and the trail. How to read gaits? What can we learn from them? Can it help us to know the animal better ?

Oded regularly publish his experiences and adventures in the field on Facebook and on Instagram. He is currently based in Belgium.

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Michael Hewing

Michael Hewing: has been a tracker since 2018 and he is mapping bats for living, as a freelancer he is also monitoring otters and dormice.
Very fascinated from observing animals day and night, he spends a lot of time with night visions, cameras and binoculars in the fields.
With www.wildlife-muenster.de he teaches track & sign and he shows people carefully the nocturnal wildlife.

Bats and their sign: Often seen at night, these skilful hunters do not leave many signs.
This workshop will introduce this awesome creatures and how to detect them.
We will learn where bats rest, how we recognise their spots and how we differ their rare signs from other animals like rodents.

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Sylvia Meise

Sylvia Meise: Sylvia is a passionate tracker, photographer and writer. She does bird mapping and cares for one of ten peregrine breeding spots in Frankfurt. With tracking-courses for beginners she hands on knowledge and fascination for this basic cultural skill.

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Asaf Ben David

Asaf Ben David: Ph.D. Student at the zoology school of Tel-Aviv university. A member of the Wild track research group. The author of the Israeli track and sings field guide and the founder of Makommifgash.org, the leading community of wildlife trackers in Israel. website: https://makommifgash.org

Track Plate:I will conduct a workshop on track plates. This will cover their design, placement, species identification, and how to develop a citizen science project using track plates.

Asaf and Larissa Slaney will also co host a discussion on how trackers can work with Academics in the field of research.

Kersey Lawrence

Kersey Lawrence: Senior Trackers and Evaluator with CyberTracker Conservation. Kersey is also the Director of Education and Research for Original Wisdom. Together with her partner Lee Gutteridge Kersey runs guide training, tracking, education and research programs across the world. Kersey holds a doctorate from the University of Connecticut in the ecology of tracking and the culture of trackers. She combines quantitative and qualitative methods, incorporating local knowledge and skill into modern science to advance our wholistic understanding of the natural world.  Kersey and Lee’s work takes them all over the world, with the majority of their focus on the African savannas and the forests of North America. There, they teach tracking experientially, and ensure that trackers meet the internationally recognised gold-standard set by CyberTracker. Together, they facilitate TrackerMentoring.com, an international online education company and published The Tracker Mentoring Manual. Through their passion for tracking, Kersey and Lee strive to inspire others to appreciate and protect the diverse beauty of our planet.

Details to Follow:

Bob Cowley

Bob Cowley:

Bob Cowley believes that Track & Sign is a great way to reconnect people of all ages with the natural world around them. Beyond that, a good understanding of this skill is an invaluable asset for any professional ecologist, zoological researcher, or student. As a result, Bob is passionate about spreading the awareness and knowledge of this ancient skill.

In the last few years, Bob has managed to establish Track & Sign courses as essential components of the Mammal Society’s annual training programme. But as well as travelling throughout the UK to teach these formal courses, Bob also leads a lot of less formal walks and workshops for other national and local organisations, working with participants of all age-groups from primary school to pensioners.

Bob is particularly enthusiastic about the CyberTracker system for tracker education and certification. He recently added Level 3 Trailing to his long-standing T&S certification to achieve the status of Level 3 Tracker. But in addition to participating, Bob has hosted a number of T&S Evals in the Oxford area.

Details to Follow: 

Linda Losito

Linda Losito: Linda’s interest in tracking is grounded in a broad knowledge and lifelong interest in Natural History. As a coleopterist, Linda has now identified and recorded nearly 1000 different species of beetle within the UK. And as an author, she has contributed to several books on different aspects of Natural History, as well as a number of papers and articles in different specialist journals.

Microsign: When searching for Tracks and Signs, we are always restricted by the limitations of our vision. Sometimes we suspect that there may be important details that we can’t quite see, and we reach for a magnifying lens or a torch. But can we go beyond that?

By focusing her microscope on various forms of waste and debris, Linda has been able to identify the traces of hundreds of species, gaining new insights into the lives of a surprising variety of insects, birds, and mammals.

Kim Cabrera

Kim Cabrera: Kim has been interested in wildlife and tracking since childhood. Her father showed her tracks, and she caught the tracking bug! Cabrera taught tracking to adults and children in her work with state parks. She has provided illustrations to several books on tracking, and wrote the first web site about animal tracks in 1997. She has two CyberTracker Track and Sign Specialist certifications, in desert and forest biomes. She has a Level II in Trailing. Cabrera is also certified in tracking lost people, at Tracker II level. She maintains several social media groups focused on tracking, with over 35,000 members. Outside of tracking, she enjoys photography and hiking.

Strategies for Food Storage in Various Animals and Implications for Trackers:

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Stani Groeneweg

Stani Groeneweg: Whether tracking, guiding, or training people in survival and bushcraft, Stani’s life and career revolve around his love of the wilderness and wildlife. His diverse career spans roles in the military, television production, conservation work with anti-poaching rangers, and survival training for European Space Agency astronauts – making him at home in the world’s most remote and extreme environments.

Since being introduced to the basics of animal tracking by his family in Poland as a child, Stani has taken every opportunity to develop his skills. Initially trained in man tracking, he was later introduced to the Cybertracker System and passionately started studying animal tracking. He recently achieved  professional tracker level in Europe and professional Track & Sign with level 3 in Trailing in Africa.

Both man tracking and animal tracking make up a large part of his on-going work with rangers in Africa.

Together with a team of trackers, Stani is currently bringing together his experience to establish the European Tracking School in Spain.

Stani has kindly agreed to run two events for us this year.

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Antje Beneken und Ulrike Quartier

Antje and Ulrike will be delivering a session together

Antje: is Trailing Specialist according to the international CyberTracker standard and has extensive training in wilderness education and tracking. She is the Owner of the Wilderness School “Naturcamp Dresden” and lives here with her family and loyal dog. As a passionate wilderness educator, experienced tracker and mentor, she imparts her knowledge in seminars/workshops and teaches children in facts of biology. The art of tracking and trailing is particularly close to her heart: recognising, recording and following fresh tracks of wild animals – also as a fantastic means of connection and basic scientific knowledge.

Ulrike: is a certificated Trailing Specialist too and passionate to follow wild animals since she was a little girl. Growing up in a family of hunters, nature lovers and gardeners, the connection to nature has been the heart of her childhood. She is experienced in teaching Track and Sign / Trailing and mentoring people of different backgrounds in workshops for many years. Since 2007 she is working at the Laboratory School and the Oberstufen-Kolleg Bielefeld as a coordinating nature educator in practice, research (University of Bielefeld) and school development.

Trailing skills are key elements to change perspectives, to get in resonance with the world and in transformational processes.

Trailing – How to start?: The workshop offers a practical introduction to trailing with short exercises.

What do we mean when we talk about trailing? How do we get started?

What are the basic techniques you need? What do we need to consider in advance?

We are simulating a possible trailing event by spontaneously orienting ourselves in the new environment during the workshop. We will talk about age determination, map knowledge, knowledge of species, weather conditions, techniques and much more. We can share our experiences in different environments and get into a lively exchange of knowledge.

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Larissa Slaney

Larissa Slaney: Larissa is a founding member of the WildTrack Specialist Group, which specialises in the use of non-invasive methods for wildlife monitoring. She is currently a PhD candidate and works on cheetah footprint analysis at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, U.K, where she runs the Fit Cheetahs research project. She also collaborated with Fred Kistner, Asaf Ben David and WildTrack on otter footprint analysis. In addition, Larissa develops science workshops and has worked internationally as a science communicator. Her interests are in non-invasive wildlife monitoring, education and traditional tracking. She is CT certified at level 2 in Track & Sign and level 1 in Trailing.

Talk: What’s in a footprint? – Footprint analysis as a non-invasive tool for wildlife conservation

Tracks are a ubiquitous sign that many animals leave behind, which makes them a great potential data source for non-invasive species monitoring. Yet, tracks are rarely used beyond presence-absence studies in wildlife conservation. So, what’s in a footprint? The Footprint Identification Technology (FIT) by WildTrack has been developed for many different species from mice to rhinos to extract a range of information from tracks. I will showcase several studies and explain why trackers play an important role in the future of this research field.

Discussion: Tracking for Research (with Asaf Ben David)

Tracking is as old as humanity and Louis Liebenberg has even described it as the origin of science. But is tracking getting the place it deserves in modern research? To what extent is tracking being used and what else does it have to offer? Should indigenous and modern trackers get more involved in academic research and in conservation projects? How could we make this collaboration work?

Last year’s talk showed a lot of interest in this topic, and we would like to create the opportunity to discuss it in more depth, come up with some plans and a chance to network.

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Kristian De La Riva

Kristian De La Riva: To follow

Nate Harvey

Nate Harvey: evaluates trackers for Tracker Certification North America (TCNA) in both Trailing and Track & Sign Identification. He lives in the northeastern US. Before Covid, he came regularly to Europe to help train trackers, especially on trails.

“The Doe in My Sights”: In this presentation, CyberTracker Evaluator Nate Harvey builds on prior presentations about evasive behaviours that we can recognise in the trails of White-tailed deer to discuss options for approaching closely enough that we can take a shot. This includes a review of some differences in the responses of bucks and does, also juveniles, to trail-hunting and how our choice of who we take can impact the animal’s group as well as ourselves. This presentation is not just for hunters but also for trackers who want to approach deer and other animals.

Frederick Kistner

Frederick is currently completing his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he applies machine learning to analyze animal tracks in order to predict species, sex, and even identify individuals. His primary focus is on the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), a species he has been studying for over a decade through its footprints and trails.

As a certified Level 3 tracker in Track & Sign, Frederick follows otters along the wild coastline of Costa Vicentina, Portugal, often near his favorite surf breaks.

Whenever he manages to step away from his computer, he combines his two passions—tracking and surfing—by searching for otter trails right next to the waves. He finds his nature breaks exploring the Black Forest, just a stone’s throw from his home—hiking, tracking, and trailing wildlife as a mental and physical balance to his day job.

Beyond his research, Frederick is a founding member of the WildTrack Specialist Group, which seeks to bridge the gap between ancient tracking knowledge and cutting-edge AI-driven conservation science. By merging these two worlds, he and his colleagues aim to develop scalable and meaningful biodiversity research methods that honour both traditional ecological wisdom and modern computational power.

Bridging Traditional Tracking and AI: Following Otters from Field to Algorithm

 Part One: Tracking Otters – A Field-Based Exchange

This session begins with an introduction to Eurasian otters, focusing on their tracks, signs, and movement patterns. We will explore how to differentiate otter signs from those of other species and discuss key characteristics of imperfect footprints—a reality every tracker must deal with.

The heart of this part is an open exchange of field experiences, where I will share personal anecdotes from tracking otters along rivers and coastlines, highlighting the challenges and rewards of reading the landscape. Participants are encouraged to share their own insights, discuss identification challenges, and reflect on how we interpret tracks. Example slides and real-world cases will help guide the discussion.

Part Two: Computer-Assisted Tracking – AI Meets Field Expertise

The second part shifts toward a more structured presentation on how artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision can be applied to wildlife tracking. We will briefly introduce AI-based species identification, explaining how models are trained, what type of input data is required, and where the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches lie.

A key focus will be on Morphometric Footprint Identification Technology (FIT), a method for estimating species, sex, and even individual IDs from tracks. Using Eurasian otters as a case study, we will compare FIT with AI-based methods, discuss how such models can be made interpretable, and explore ways to make these technologies more accessible to trackers and conservationists alike.

Rene Nauta

Both Rene and John will be hosting this years event

John Rhyder

Both Rene and John will be hosting this years event