Novel application of a conservation detection dog to recover wildlife telemetry equipment
Shoshana Rapley·Adrian D. Manning·Micha V. Jackson·Heather M. McGinness·Robert Heinsohn·Claudio Sillero-Zubiri·Iain J. Gordon·Maldwyn J. Evans
Wildlife tracking technologies are increasingly used to study animal behaviour, inform conservation management, and answer fundamental questions in ecology. However, a drawback to wildlife telemetry is that equipment is expensive and can be difficult to retrieve when lost in the field, leading to loss of data and inefficient use of project resources. As a potential solution, we began training dogs to search for and locate GPS tracking devices by scent. This approach targets the odour of the devi