A Practive Faeces Collection Protocol for Multidisciplinary Research in Wildlife Science

Abstract

Faecal samples have become an important noninvasive source of information in wildlife biology and ecological research. Despite regular use of faeces, there is no universal protocol available for faeces collection and storage to answer various questions in wildlife biology. In this study we collected 1408 faeces from ten different species using a dry sampling approach, and achieved 77.49% and 75.25% success rate in mitochondrial and nuclear marker amplifications respectively. We suggest a universal framework to use the same samples to answer different questions. This protocol provides an easy, quick and cheap option to collect non-invasive samples from species living in different environmental conditions to answer multidisciplinary questions in wildlife biology.