Tracking traces: technology, body and ethics in the field of wildlife monitoring

During 2022 and 2025, I participated in wildlife fieldwork alongside ecologists in China, assisting with camera trap deployment in a North Chinese leopard conservation project in Shanxi and GPS collaring of Chinese mountain cats in Qinghai. This paper reflects on the methodological and ethical tensions that emerged from these encounters. It explores how the very tools designed to bring us closer to animal lives – camera traps, GPS collars and data visualisations – can, in their execution, produce new forms of distance, erasure and representational violence. Drawing on embodied field experiences, the paper traces three moments of friction: the ambushing logic of camera trap deployment, the ethical tremor of witnessing an anaesthetised body being handled and the narrative impoverishment of data abstraction. It considers what these experiences offer cultural geographers interested in the politics of method, the place of bodily and affective knowledge in research and the possibilities for more responsible, situated practices of interdisciplinary collaboration. The paper argues for a mode of engagement that holds data in tension with what escapes it, attending to the unruly, the excessive and the pause that carries all that cannot be captured.