Fathoming sea turtles: monitoring strategy evaluation to improve conservation status assessments.

ABSTRACT: Population monitoring must be accurate and reliable to correctly classify population status. For sea turtles, nesting beach surveys are often the only population-level surveys that are accessible. However, process and observation errors, compounded by delayed maturity, obscure the relationship between trends on the nesting beach and the population. We present a simulation-based tool, monitoring strategy evaluation (MoSE), to test the relationships between monitoring data and assessment accuracy, using green sea turtles, Chelonia mydas, as a case study. To explore this first application of MoSE, we apply different treatments of population impacts to virtual true populations, and sample the nests or nesters, with observation error, to test if the observation data can be used to diagnose popu

SUBMITTER: Piacenza SE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6851787 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature