It is unclear how many tigers are even left in Cambodia, where - as in much of Asia - poaching and habitat encroachment are blamed for their decimation.
The turn to dogs came after camera traps and field surveys failed to find the big cats last year. The last sign of a tiger was in 2007, when a paw print was spotted in the park.
"We think this is the best method when we have a large area and not that many tigers," said Hannah O'Kelly, a wildlife-monitoring adviser for the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York-based organization.
WCS and the wildcat conservation group Panthera, also based in New York, are spending about $30,000 to bring Maggie and a second dog from Russia to Seima later this year.
The effort to find tiger droppings is part of a larger campaign by conservationists worldwide to mine animal droppings for genetic information that can save endangered species.
Elephant dung, for example, was used two years ago to calculate the population of pachyderms in Malaysia's Taman Negara National Park.
Now, researchers are hoping the tiger scat will help determine the existence of tigers in Seima along with their sex, age, and whether any are pregnant or even under threat.
"As we gain the technology to extract things from scat like DNA and hormones, all of a sudden scat becomes a gold mine of information," said Linda Kerley, a WCS consultant who trained the dogs in Russia.
O'Kelly said data from the dung would allow researchers to establish a baseline population of tigers for the reserve and then develop a conservation plan based on the numbers and the potential threats. Bringing in the two dogs is part of a $10 million, 10-year initiative launched in 2006 by WCS and Panthera called "Tigers Forever." It aims to increase the number of tigers by 50 percent in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Burma, the Russian Far East, and Thailand through a range of measures that include better monitoring, assessments of threats, and efforts to minimize the dangers the cats face.
Men Soriyun, a project manager for the conservation area, said the dogs offer the best hope of finding the tigers.
