Open Data requirements for applied ecology and conservation: case study of a wide-ranging marine vertebrate
Version 2 2024-05-30, 10:33Version 2 2024-05-30, 10:33
Version 1 2017-10-09, 15:52Version 1 2017-10-09, 15:52
journal contribution
posted on 2024-05-30, 10:33authored byG 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.