Understanding the impact of chemical contaminants on turtles can inform turtle conservation and also can guide efforts to protect and conserve larger ecosystems. Partners in WWF-Australia’s Rivers to Reef to Turtles project have spent the past four years studying the chemical profile and health impacts of pollutants found in green turtles in the hope of improving the way turtles and their habitats are monitored and conserved.

Developers eyeing coastal locations often need information quickly to make the best choices about where to site their projects for minimum environmental impact. Often there are little or no data available on sea turtle nesting, and collecting field data can be slow and costly. An international environmental consultancy is creating a software tool that can rapidly assess and rank the value of beaches for their potential sea turtle nesting importance in areas where biological data are absent.

We are excited to announce the availability of The State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Report, vol. XIII, now available online and in print. Explore the sea turtles of Japan, loggerhead turtle movements in the Pacific Ocean, and the sea turtles of the French territories through all new maps and data visualizations. Other articles explore bycatch solutions, plastic pollution, the Kemp's ridley's status, and more. 

Africa’s sea turtles were once among the least studied in the world, and mounting threats to their survival, such as fishing, poaching, coastal development, and pollution, still require further study and urgent attention. Today, a growing number of institutions and individuals are shedding new light on sea turtle science, and they are helping find solutions to the continent’s sea turtle and ocean conservation challenges.

During more than a decade of conservation, Vamizi’s 1,500 native residents have entirely turned away from their longstanding tradition of daily turtle consumption. Though researchers celebrated the shift as a conservation success, Interviews with local residents revealed some unsettling motivations for the change in behavior…

Global concern is growing about the current and future impacts of sea-level rise that will likely affect coastal property owners, beach-based economies, and sea turtle nesting beaches. Coastal erosion is bad for all those factions, yet effective long-term solutions to confront the rising tide of beach erosion are few and far between.

Marine megafauna, such as sea turtles and manatees, provide valuable ecosystem services, and the absence of those creatures in an ecological community can lead to severe imbalance. Up to the minute data on megafauna presence and abundance are often hard to acquire. To confront that challenge, in 2015 the African Marine Mammal Conservation Organization (AMMCO)—a Cameroon-based nongovernmental organization—created the first mobile phone application, SIREN, dedicated specifically to marine megafauna data collection in West Africa.

People living on temperate shores are familiar with phenomena such as the salmon run, in which entire ecosystems emerge from winter hibernation, starving for nutrition and desperately waiting for the salmon to arrive. Sea turtle nesting is no different; it creates a massive nutrient pulse into otherwise nutrient-poor beach ecosystems.

One of the most insidious threats to sea turtles in West-Central Africa is the impact of coastal development. Two coastal towns that illustrate this phenomenon well are the megacities of Lagos, Nigeria, and Pointe-Noire, Republic of the Congo. More adult sea turtles and nests have been lost to direct take as urban expansion and coastal settlement in those cities have brought increased light, ocean pollution and vessel traffic.