ONCE OR TWICE A MONTH, Peter Callen, Mitch Johnson and friends go for a hike in the nearby mountains or along the river, practicing what naturalists and hunters have done for millennia: tracking animal sign. They look for hoof prints, scat, and indications that animals may have stopped to eat or lie down. They try to identify the type of animal and where it was headed. They take notes about what they’ve seen.
    There’s a difference to the enterprise of amateur naturalist nowadays, however. Callen and friends are part of a nonprofit conservation group working to protect wilderness. That calls for legislation, which requires scientific data—reams of it—that in many cases does not exist for particular areas. Years of reductions in funding and staffing have left agencies like the Forest Service and BLM with few resources for basic monitoring of the lands in their jurisdictions. So Callen and other volunteers collect data themselves.

               Every month of the year, the group walks one of seven parcels of land, approximately 200 by 400 feet, and tracks which animals have come down off the Sandia or traveled the arroyos that cross I-25. Their Placitas-based group, Pathways: Wildlife Corridors of New Mexico, was formed to identify and protect routes that large animals use to cross between mountain ranges, as they need to do to survive (“Room to Roam”). Over the years, this has led to some intriguing maps that show wildlife movement between the Sandia, Jemez, and Sangre de Cristo ranges, across the Galisteo Basin, along corridors free of human development.
    Back in the mid- to late 2000s, the mapping was all done by nature-lovers toting notebooks and field guides, in time-honored fashion. Recently, however, the task has been transformed by the phenomenon known as citizen science, a worldwide movement that uses the power of the Internet and crowdsourcing to advance scientific research.

FROM BIOLOGY TO ASTRONOMY, genetics to climate science, amateurs are not only observing natural phenomena, they are uploading what they notice to websites like iNaturalist, Project BudBurst, and eBird, where it can be accessed by researchers, students, policy-makers, anyone with an Internet connection.
    “A lot of great science has come from people who love nature,” says Callen, who is hiking with Renee Robillard on this spring Saturday to one of the seven transects that Pathways monitors, in Perdiz Canyon. “To call something science just means that you record the time and place, so it can be revisited.”

     To ensure that their observations are useful to others, Pathways volunteers have learned to use tracking protocol developed by the group CyberTracker, founded by a researcher working with Bushmen in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. This free online software allows tracking information to be entered even by people who cannot read or write, and pinpoints the location via GPS-enabled smartphones. Pathways was fortunate to come across the program through Casey McFarland, a CyberTracker trainer who lives in Cedar Crest and helped set up their protocols.
    Any Boy Scout will tell you there are many levels to animal tracking, from guessing what animal’s foot made a print, to knowing its gender, direction, speed, and likely activity. McFarland rates trackers in a two-day test in the field, giving them a score of 3 (expert) down to 1—but even scoring 1 usually takes a couple of tries.

Trackers also have to learn how to input their data correctly, so it’s useful to researchers. Everything is measured, recorded, photographed, matched to GPS data, and described in a running narrative. Eventually it all gets uploaded to iNaturalist and stored in Pathways’ own data base.
          “Our target animals are the large mammals that move between mountain ranges—elk, mule deer, bobcat, mountain lion, black bear, and pronghorn,” says Callen. “We also record vegetation, weather conditions, soil aridity, and other observations.” Such information might help the Forest Service, for example, understand the reason for dips in wildlife populations. In many cases, the only monitoring that has been done by wildlife agencies is from the air or through educated guesswork (modeling).