Darwin's Ark
Open-source canine science with 40,000+ owner-uploaded dogs and growing.
Darwin's Ark is the open citizen-science project that asks dog owners to upload survey data and (optionally) DNA. It powers the Karlsson lab's research on canine behavior, breed identity, and the genetic architecture of complex traits in mixed-breed populations. As of recent releases, the project has data from over 40,000 dogs, with full sequencing released under permissive open-data licenses.
Darwin's Ark is the open-data counterpart to CanVAS. The Sniff Atlas now includes 3,277 Darwin's Ark dogs from the Lord et al. 2025 PNAS release on Dryad — the first major mixed-breed expansion to the atlas, projected into the pinned CanVAS PCA-256 + UMAP-3D space without disturbing existing dogs. License: CC0 public domain.
- Mixed 2,522 dogs
- American Pit Bull Terrier 104 dogs
- Chihuahua 46 dogs
- Labrador Retriever 44 dogs
- German Shepherd 30 dogs
- Poodle 28 dogs
- Golden Retriever 28 dogs
- Border Collie 24 dogs
- Morrill et al. 2022. Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes. Science. doi:10.1126/science.abk0639
- Lord et al. 2025. Genetic testing predicts appearance but not behavior in dogs. PNAS. doi:10.5061/dryad.83bk3jb4r