DNA Inventory Using the same techniques and equipment that are applied in human forensics, we use genetic data to tie noninvasively collected samples to specific individuals. With a variety of field techniques — most commonly a scent-baited barbed-wire enclosure — researchers obtain systematic collections of samples at several points in time. After genetic methods have established which individual each sample came from, mark-recapture models are used to estimate the number of individuals in the study population. Our directors have been active participants in this field from the beginning , and WGI has demonstrated the utility of this approach in species ranging from sturgeon to pine marten. We believe that our quality control methods are good enough to ensure 100% accuracy of individual assignments in most studies, and we challenge our customers to devise blind tests that can prove us wrong. In our most challenging project to date, we identified 545 individual grizzly bears from hairs collected in the Rocky Mountains of Montana through a project led by Katherine Kendall of the USGS. Kate didn't want any doubts to linger over her results, so she interspersed over 700 hair samples from known bears among her 34,000 project samples, hoping to use these blind control samples to provide an estimate of our error rate. As we were informed after handing over the final results, no errors were made in assigning individual identity for the 700 blind control samples. This puts the risk of laboratory errors in perspective; most projects assign individual identity to fewer than 700 samples. In another example, Robert Mulders(1) and colleagues have been snagging hairs from wolverines using posts that are wrapped in barbed-wire and topped with a bait. The method is remarkably successful, with the majority of posts collecting wolverine hair and the majority of individuals in the population getting 'captured' each year. The cold, dry environment of the Barren Grounds preserves the samples, producing unusually strong genetic results. Robert is using the genetic data that we produce to monitor abundance and individual movements around several diamond mining developments. (1)Norwest Territories Dept. of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development