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Open Data requirements for applied ecology and conservation: case study of a wide-ranging marine vertebrate

Version 2 2024-05-30, 10:33
Version 1 2017-10-09, 15:52
journal contribution
posted on 2024-05-30, 10:33 authored by G Schofield
Wide-ranging animals often traverse more than one country, making it important to establish international management co-operations and agreed protocols; however, accessing all available information on a given species, or even a population of interest, compiled by local, national and international organisations is often complicated. In the case of sea turtles, this issue is further compounded because different life stages of the same population occupy different types of habitat; even as adults, while part of the population aggregates to breed at a single site in a given year, all other adult individuals are dispersed across foraging habitats in distance. Information on the number of individuals, movement patterns and habitat use are needed to: (1) identify, select and conserve key breeding, foraging and developmental habitat effectively, (2) develop realistic models to predict current and future threat status of animals as accurately as possible, and (3) mitigate pressures operating in distant areas that, otherwise, might not be detected or linked to the population of interest. Here, I use sea turtles as a case study to show how our current knowledge on wide-ranging marine species is currently incomplete and, in many cases, disjointed. In particular, different techniques are often used to assimilate different types of information in different settings for different purposes (e.g. mark-recapture, genetics, strandings and nesting data). Ultimately, opening access to these data sources would facilitate major advances in research, as well as the transfer of knowledge and information to practitioners, allowing the effective implementation of conservation management.

History

Journal

Ethics in science and environmental politics

Volume

17

Pagination

19-27

Location

Oldendorf, Germany

ISSN

1863-5415

eISSN

1611-8014

Language

eng

Publication classification

C Journal article, C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2017, The Author

Publisher

Inter-Research