Guest Speaker: Megan Barnes – The power of a conservation detection dog team for threatened flora

Megan is the founding director of Detection for Good. She is a research scientist, threatened species ecologist, certified professional trainer, and operational detection dog handler and works on projects across WA and Australia.

Megan and her dogs work as a team to detect threatened species, and the threatened (and not so threatened) wildflowers captured her heart the day she moved to WA five years ago. Training and deploying Conservation Detection Dogs to collect data brings her skills and passions together and she collaborates with experts internationally to deliver exciting novel detection dog research and applications.Conservation detection dogs can sniff out targets impossible for us to find. Whether they are cryptic, tiny, underground or underwater! Conservation Detection teams are useful for population estimates, rapid surveys, and real-time identification of rare plants. Because detection dogs use scent, they often find young, hidden, or damaged plants that visual searches may miss, and they can identify difficult to distinguish plants without flowers.

They can also support threatened flora conservation through supporting management activities including: early detection of invasives, assisting weed removal crews by locating hard-to-find individuals, and identification of pathogens. We will showcase a number of conservation dog applications for threatened flora worldwide, as well as some local work DFG is undertaking, providing insights into the work of conservation detection dog teams and when and how they can be most useful for threatened flora conservation.

To learn more visit www.detectionforgood.com