A presentation by:
Pete Coppolillo, Ph.D., Executive Director of Working Dogs for Conservation
Dogs are being trained to protect aquatic ecosystems, particularly from aquatic nuisance species, around the world. Executive director of Working Dogs for Conservation, Pete Coppolillo, Ph.D., will share how dogs have been able to detect invasive plants and animals, and span the continuum from early detection to mapping and containing infestations, to eradication, with examples from around the United States. He’ll also share some unanticipated benefits of working with dogs, along with pictures and stories from the field.
About the speaker:
Pete Coppolillo, Ph.D., is a career conservationist with a dog problem. Trained as a landscape ecologist, most of Pete’s research and conservation work has been in Africa. Pete is a fluent Swahili speaker, after 17 years of work in western and central Tanzania, where he founded the Ruaha Landscape Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS and formerly the New York Zoological Society). During his last few years with WCS, Pete collaborated with Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C) to use detection dogs to monitor endangered species in Tanzania and the United States. These collaborations led Pete to join the Board of WD4C and then become its Executive Director for the last 13 years.
Pete has served on the Boards of American Wildlands, The Laguntza Foundation and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition where he served as Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and chaired the Conservation and Audit Committees. Since then, and thanks to dogs’ enormous potential, WD4C has seen a tripling of staff, 5-fold growth in budget, and nearly 10-fold increase in the number of dogs working to save wildlife and wild places around the world (32 countries and 45 U.S. states).
Pete’s dog problem is not just professional; at their home in Bozeman he and his partner, artist Jill Johnson, live with a 12-year old wirehaired pointing griffon (Birch), a 1 year old Braque Francois puppy (Enzo), and he lives by the principle that “the optimal number of bird dogs is one more than you have.”
