Do detection dogs respond differently to dried, frozen and live plant targets?

Abstract

Weeds can have detrimental impacts on agriculture and the environment, and effective detection of individual plants is a crucial component of weed management. An emerging detection tool is the use of dogs (Canis familiaris) trained to recognise a weed's scent. Scent-detection dogs are well established as a tool in other disciplines but deploying dogs within weed management poses novel challenges. It can be difficult (or even illegal) to source a large number of live target weeds for training and evaluation purposes, due to the risk that these targets will create further detrimental impacts. We investigate whether invasive weed samples could be processed into inert and therefore bio secure dr..