A recent study experimenting with the use of trained dogs to detect invasive plants in North America found that canines are indeed better than humans at finding spotted knapweed. However:
The dogs’ performance wasn’t perfect: they tended to issue more false alarms than humans. And one of the animals, Tsavo, was prone to “distraction by ground squirrels,” the authors note. But overall, the results suggest that dogs could be valuable additions to teams on the hunt for invasive plants.
Conservation Magazine [via Jen Philips’ Twitter]