The young woman with the clipboard had an unusual request.

It was a chilly Thursday morning a few weeks ago at a new dog park on the East River in Queens. The sun glinted hard on the choppy water. Off-leash dogs ran up and down little hills of concrete as the woman explained her mission to the owner of a mutt named Alice.

“Will you be willing to give us your dog’s poop?” she asked.

Alice’s owner said yes. So did a woman with an Irish terrier named Scarlet.

“I do research myself, so I’m very sympathetic to people who collect data, whatever data it is,” said Scarlet’s owner, Annie Duflo.

So, gladly, did the owner of a 120-pound Alaskan malamute, Juno. “Juno’s poop is pretty big, so everybody usually runs away from it, not toward it,” said his owner, Shaun Hostutler, who works for the Air Force.