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Mission
Our mission is to unite highly trained conservation detection dog teams with researchers to collect scientific data. We aim to provide mentorship, education, and foster collaboration among scientists, novice handlers, and local communities.
Core Values
Our core values are collaboration, Humane Hierarchy-based training, and enthusiasm for sharing knowledge about the conservation detection dog methodology.
We pride ourselves on creative solutions for challenging projects, top-notch dog welfare, and safety in the field.
Our conservation detection dog teams travel the world finding the samples you need.
We specialize in the inter-mountain west of the USA and Latin America. Hablamos español!
Dogs are especially helpful at finding small or cryptic plants that evade human searchers or searching large areas quickly. Our dogs are efficient even when discriminating between closely related plants.
Dogs are incredibly useful for finding scat, carcasses, and nests. They are able to find samples from subordinate and juvenile individuals that human searchers may miss.
Our team has experience screening all types of watercraft for invasive mussels. Dogs are also useful for identifying remnant or pioneer populations of hard-to-find invertebrates.
What We Do
We train dogs to sniff out your data -- or train you to work with your own dog. From carcasses on wind farms to invasive mussels on boats to the scat of jaguars in the Guatemalan jungle, our teams are up to the challenge. We specialize in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Latin America.
We offer a variety of creative services to meet your needs and budget.
Our dog training methods are rooted in the Humane Hierarchy of dog training. Wherever possible, our dogs go through double-blind odor recognition trials using relevant distractor odors prior to deployment.
Learn more about how conservation detection dogs work on our blog.
View our 2022 Annual Report here.
View our 2023 Annual Report here.
Why Dogs?
Let's be honest: there are other species whose olfactory capabilities rival dogs'. But dogs have been bred for thousands of years to collaborate closely with humans. The dogs we work with are insatiably obsessed with toys, making every day in the field feel like another day at the park for them.
Our dogs are highly motivated bio-sensors that are readily "calibrated" to new target odors. They're all-terrain, all-weather "vehicles" that are more enthusiastic about their work than the world's best intern.
Best of all, they're charismatic conservation ambassadors who happily hold down the couch in our homes.
Why We Do It
Our dogs bring boundless enthusiasm (and charisma) to the dirty side of data collection. Their joy (and accuracy) for finding hard-to-find data keeps us coming back for more.
Our founder dog, Barley, is a rescue. We're passionate about giving high-energy dogs the best life possible through work while providing top-notch ecological detection services to our partners and clients.
