Efficient and systematic survey methods are essential for wildlife researchers and conservationists to collect accurate ecological data that can be used to make informed conservation decisions. For endangered and elusive species, that are not easily detected by conventional methods, reliable, time- and cost-efficient methodologies become increasingly important. Across a growing spectrum of conservation research projects, survey outcomes are benefitting from scent detection dogs that assist with locating elusive species. This paper describes the training methodology used to investigate the ability of a scent detection dog to locate live riverine rabbits (Bunolagus monticularis) in their natural habitat, and to determine how species-specific the dog was towards the target scent in a controlled environment. The dog was trained using operant conditioning and a non-visual methodology, with only limited scent from roadkill specimens available. The dog achieved a 98% specificity rate towards the target scent, indicating that the dog was able to distinguish the scent of riverine rabbits from the scent of other lagomorph species. The dog has already been able to locate ten of these elusive individuals in the wild. The training method proved successful in the detection of this critically endangered species, where scent for training was only available from deceased specimens.
In the paper the existing results concerning a special kind of trajectories and the theory of first return continuous functions connected with them are used to examine some algebraic properties of classes of functions. To that end we define a new class of functions (denoted $Conn^*$) contained between the families (widely described in literature) of Darboux Baire 1 functions (${\rm DB}_1$) and connectivity functions ($Conn$). The solutions to our problems are based, among other, on the suitable construction of the ring, which turned out to be in some senses an “optimal construction“. These considerations concern mainly real functions defined on $[0,1]$ but in the last chapter we also extend them to the case of real valued iteratively $H$-connected functions defined on topological spaces.