🐾 Efficacy Trials: Ensuring Detection Dogs Deliver for Conservation 🐾
Detection dogs are powerful allies in wildlife conservation, helping locate protected species, invasive plants, and signs of illegal activity. But how do we know these dogs truly work?
That’s where efficacy trials come in.
These trials test how accurately and reliably detection dogs find their targets under real-world conditions. Key features include:
🔍 Blind testing to prevent handler bias
🌿 Evaluating dog performance across different environments
⚖️ Measuring false alerts and missed detections
📊 Comparing dogs with other survey methods like camera traps or eDNA
Detection dog efficacy trials offer key insights into how well dogs perform in conservation work. They assess how accurately and sensitively dogs detect target scents, while measuring error rates like false positives or misses. Blind trials help remove handler bias, ensuring objective results. These trials also evaluate how factors like terrain, weather, and habitat affect performance, and highlight differences between individual dogs. By comparing dogs to other survey methods, they support cost-effective decision-making. Ultimately, well-designed, externally assessed trials build credibility and ensure dog-assisted programs are scientifically robust and scalable.
👇 Comment below and join the discussion on efficacy trials! Have you run efficacy trials for detection dogs, need support, or just looking to start planning? We’d love to hear from you!
Link to research checklist: https://www.ecologydetectiondogwg.org/_files/ugd/614ff5_2b3b8ba9975641f2b22a6ca9905c1eb5.pdf
Nicely said and would agree on your assessment of both internal and external assessed.
Internally assessing your team ensures your up to the task and highlights any areas that may need attention whether its the search, the indication or discrimination etc. While having any organization, group or certifying body to act as a third party can be a very good way to confirm or back up what internal assessment results may show.
I feel in the UK like here in the Republic these third parties don't exits? and from my experience it might not always be possible to get clients to assist, which leads to another point should clients assist?
However regardless of how teams are assessed if everybody has a different assessment method what's the point, which brings in the standardization you mentioned.
I wonder if people feel if there was a standard set of criteria in place that everyone had access to and worked towards would this not be a good idea?