One of the most pressing conservation issues that countries face today, is the need to distinguish between multiple, concurrent pressures facing wildlife over large geographic ranges. The Center for Conservation Biology’s Conservation Canine program at the University of Washington addresses this need by combining the precision and the efficiency of the detection dogs to readily locate wildlife scat samples, with the ability to extract a wide variety of genetic and physiological indicators from scat. Use of detection dogs to locate wildlife scat over large areas was pioneered in 1997 by Samuel Wasser, Director of the Center for Conservation Biology, University of Washington. Since then, Conservation Canines (CK9) has been non-invasively monitoring a diverse array of threatened and endangered species around the world. The case of canines to track invasive alien iguanas in Saint Lucia is highlighted in this article.
Read PDF here: Tucker CCB Iguanas (PDF)