Global Leatherback Sea Turtle Nesting

This map displays available nesting data as of 2022 for leatherback sea turtles. The data include 988 nesting sites, compiled through a literature review and provided directly to SWOT by data contributors worldwide. Metadata and information about data sources can be explored in the interactive map.

Nesting sites are represented by orange dots scaled according to their relative nesting abundance in the most recent year for which data are available. Black dots represent nesting sites for which data are older than 10 years, data are unquantified, or the nest count for the most recent year was given as zero. For the purposes of uniformity, all types of nesting counts (e.g., number of nesting females, number of crawls) were converted to number of clutches as needed. Conversion factors ranged from 4.1 to 6.4 clutches per female and 0.75 to 0.9 crawls per clutch.

We are grateful to all of the data contributors and projects that participated in this effort.