Conservation_Canines

Human population growth and consumption are placing ever-increasing demands on the environment. Monitoring these impacts requires reliable and accessible measures of wildlife abundance, distribution and physiological health, collected over large landscapes. The Center for Conservation Biology’s mission is to develop and apply such noninvasive field, lab and analytical methods to address pressing conservation problems worldwide. Using innovating wildlife monitoring systems, our dogs locate scat (feces) of multiple target species over large remote areas and from considerable distances. We then extract DNA and a variety of hormone measures from these samples and use this information to quantify changes in the health, abundance and distribution of species threatened by one or more human disturbances. The data we generate indicate the causes of population decline, the magnitude of the problem, and what mitigation strategies are likely to be most effective.