Are we working towards global research priorities for management and conservation of sea turtles
By A. Rees, J. Alfaro‐Shigueto, Paulo C. R. Barata, K. Bjorndal, A. Bolten, J. Bourjea, AC Broderick, L. Campbell, L. Cardona, Carlos Carreras and 34 more. 2016
270 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In 2010, an international group of 35 sea turtle researchers refined an initial list of more than 200 research questions into 20 metaquestions that were considered key for management and conservation of sea turtles. These were classified under 5 categories: reproductive biology, biogeography, population ecology, threats and conservation strategies. To obtain a picture of how research is being focused towards these key questions, we undertook a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature (2014 and 2015) attributing papers to the original 20 questions. In total, we reviewed 605 articles in full and from these 355 (59%) were judged to substantively address the 20 key questions, with others focusing on basic science and monitoring. Progress to answering the 20 questions was not uniform, and there were biases regarding focal turtle species, geographic scope and publication outlet. Whilst it offers some meaningful indications as to effort, quantifying peer-reviewed literature output is obviously not the only, and possibly not the best, metric for understanding progress towards informing key conservation and management goals. Along with the literature review, an international group based on the original project consortium was assigned to critically summarise recent progress towards answering each of the 20 questions. We found that significant research is being expended towards global priorities for management and conservation of sea turtles. Although highly variable, there has been significant progress in all the key questions identified in 2010. Undertaking this critical review has highlighted that it may be timely to undertake one or more new prioritizing exercises. For this to have maximal benefit we make a range of recommendations for its execution. These include a far greater engagement with social sciences, widening the pool of contributors and focussing the questions, perhaps disaggregating ecology and conservation.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Surgery
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/590b00d12bc89b642ffd7267f8f929e7c1a034fa
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Satellite Tracking Sea Turtles: Opportunities and Challenges to Address Key Questions (2018, background): “…to address many of the key questions that have been raised and reviewed surrounding the biology and conservation of sea turtles (Hamann et al., 2007; Hays et al., 2016; Rees et al., 2016) and more broadly to marine megafauna in general, e.g., marine mammals, birds, and fish (Block et al., 2011).”
- Advances in the Application of Genetics in Marine Turtle Biology and Conservation (2017, background): “After decades of multidisciplinary, collaborative research, a striking body of knowledge has been synthesized in marine turtle biology, yet some key questions remain unresolved (reviewed in Hamann et al., 2010; Rees et al., 2016).”
- Mediterranean sea turtles: current knowledge and priorities for conservation and research (2018, unknown): “Age at sexual maturity, survival probabilities, sex ratio and reproductive output are priority parameters for future research in both species and especially in green turtles (Rees et al. 2016).”
- Conservation implications of sea turtle nesting trends: elusive recovery of a globally important loggerhead population (2019, background): “…there has been some improvement in bycatch in a few localized instances (Finkbeiner et al. 2011, Gilman and Huang 2017, Swimmer et al. 2017), the issue of bycatch is far from being resolved and continues to pose a serious threat to sea turtle recovery (Wallace et al. 2013a, Rees et al. 2016).”