ABSTRACT
Illicit substances, explosives, cancer cells, missing bodies, and various types of wildlife are just a few examples of what the keenly acute canine olfactory sense is used to detect (Cablk et al. 2008; Furton and Myers 2001; Lorenzo et al. 2003). Despite these diverse applications of canine olfactory behavior, all of these situations covered in this book require an understanding of how chemicals are dispersed and transported from the source of the chemical to the local vicinity of the canine’s nose. Fortunately, the physical understanding of these processes is generally well quantified, but unfortunately, due to the difficulty of measuring small-scale chemical signals in air, direct quantification of the spatial and temporal nature of chemical signals is missing (Farrell et al. 2002; Jain et al. 2013; Zhu 1999). What is particularly amiss in the current state of knowledge is a lack of understanding of the odor dynamics at the spatial and temporal scale at which canines detect odor information.
