How can dogs help constation efforts? Well, we know that dogs and humans work well together. We see them at the airport checking bags. We watch some guide visually impaired people across busy streets, and we know they're great for birdie sheep. But did you know that dogs and humans have been working together for over 40,000 years? And perhaps gave our species, homo sapiens, a competitive advantage against other hominids, through keeping guard, collaborative, plenty, keeping us warm and helping us track down our enemies. But first of all, today, and I'm here to talk about a new field of conservation research based on this ancient partnership. The olfactory capability of a dog is well-established. That is, there is nothing that can discriminate odour quite like that of a dog's nose. Well, actually, bears and elephants have slightly hypercaptivitis, but working with them has many problems. So dogs have around 300 million olfactory receptors compared to our 6 million and have 40 times the brain capacity for odor discrimination than we do. In fact, dogs can detect odours in the range of one part per trillion, which is superior to even the most advanced technology we have today. And it's the same as one drop in 20 Olympic sized swimming pools. So when managing threatened and going invasive species, valued or detected individuals can carry significant consequences, leading to further declines in threatened species or increased spread of invasive ones. Often these populations of rare, sparse and difficult to find. Current technologies which use visual searches such as drones and wildlife cameras may fail to detect things that are hard to see, and acoustic monitoring is limited to specific and noisy animals such as some birds and frogs. The species that may be hiding underground, elusive or well camouflaged, olfactory searching using trained dogs provides an additional tool for finding those plants and animals that other techniques may fail to detect. So my research is about hide and seek with dogs, although I'm the hider as the dogs are not very good at that part. So they run in and see a sub detection experiments with dogs, which is the scientific term for hide and seek. My research aims to evaluate which factors influence the dog's detection performance and how long a dog needs to spend looking in order to find something if it is there to be found. So no field methods are 100% reliable at finding rare species, but understanding what factors influence detection and how this may complement visual and auditory searches in order to increase detection opportunities is a major component of my research. I also aim to build an interactive platform for conservation project managers and dog handlers, which will allow them to run their own detection experiments with dogs, input the results of their performance, and output the time they should spend looking in order to find something within a given confident range if it is there. The difficulty with conservation dogs is the wide variety of targets and ecosystems within which they work, from live animals and their scats to rare orchids and plants and from the alpine regions down to the coast, dogs are now working across so many different projects and species that the time spent searching is different and becomes a critical factor in performance and there is currently no way to standardise this, however my research seeks to address this problem. Find out more information, track me down, and see ya, thanks all the same.