July 05, 2023
Press release: IGAMon-Dog wins 2nd place in the Saxony-Anhalt Environmental Award
The citizen science project IGAMonDog of the Independent Institute for Environmental Issues (UfU), Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) and Wildlife Detection Dogs e.V., was awarded second place in the Saxony-Anhalt Environmental Prize. In the project, private dog owners and their dogs are trained as volunteer species detection dog teams to find invasive species.
The IGAMonDog project has been implemented in cooperation with the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the Wildlife Detection Dogs e.V. association since April 2021. In this project, private dog owners are trained together with their dogs to become volunteer wildlife detection dog teams. The pilot project is intended to test the extent to which the time-consuming training concept is suitable for monitoring invasive species, initially plant species. The first teams of the two training years have already successfully carried out field missions and mapped their target species with the dogs.
Invasive alien species are non-native species that can spread dominantly in the areas to which they have been introduced. There is therefore a risk that native plants and animals, which are heavily dependent on each other in sensitive ecosystems, will be displaced or that human health will be impaired. In order to contain the spread of invasive plant species, information on their occurrence and spread is required. Citizen science can support science in researching these issues on a large scale, as in this case with the mapping of invasive plants.
The project mainly takes place in Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Berlin and the IGAMon-Dog project has therefore applied for the Saxony-Anhalt Environmental Award. The environmental prize has been awarded by the state’s Foundation for the Environment, Nature and Climate Protection (SUNK) for 27 years; it is endowed with a total of 20,000 euros in 2023 – the Ministry of the Environment is contributing 5,000 euros this year. The motto was “Innovative for the environment”; the competition was looking for “environmental visionaries” with fresh ideas, innovative projects or novel approaches. The IGAMon-Dog project received 5,000 euros in prize money for second place.
We would like to thank the jury for awarding this heartfelt project and all our project participants for their support. With sufficient support and funding, the project has great potential for scaling up. Around 10 million dogs are kept in Germany. If only a small fraction of these were trained together with their owners to become species detection dogs, research and authorities could be provided with significantly more data on the occurrence and spread of various IGAs in our ecosystems.
