The State of the World's Sea Turtles

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Contacts	Andrew DiMatteo, SWOT Database Manager, Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University Bryan Wallace, Conservation International
Abstract	SWOT — the State of the World’s Sea Turtles — is a partnership led by the Sea Turtle Flagship Program at Conservation International (CI), the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG), and supported by the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (MGEL) at Duke University. However, the lifeblood of the effort is the network of more than 400 people and projects that contribute data to the SWOT database, which provides the only comprehensive, global perspective of sea turtles. To date, four years of data collection have been supported by the SWOT team with focus on the nesting habitat of four species – the leatherback, loggerhead, hawksbill and flatback turtles. Eventually, SWOT will encompass data aggregation for all seven species of sea turtles. In addition to collating nesting abundance and distribution information for all species, SWOT is also working to include other types of information including in-water abundances and distributions, as well as genetic stock delineations. Furthermore, SWOT is determining recommendations for monitoring effort schemes that will allow for long-term nesting abundance and trend estimates for regional and global populations of sea turtle species. These advances will solidify SWOT as the premier global monitoring system for sea turtles. The current SWOT database contains sea turtle nesting records from over 100 countries all over the world. This online tool, hosted by OBIS-SEAMAP, builds on previous work initiated and supported by the WIDECAST organization. Here the WIDECAST Atlas and SWOT Database are displayed together. Records coming from projects that are both a part of the WIDECAST and SWOT networks are flagged as such. The WIDECAST Atlas can still be accessed as a stand-alone application. New data from the WIDECAST network is added to the SWOT database annually. Records in the SWOT database are reported in several different formats to preserve ease of reporting for individual data providers. When possible, exact counts of nesting females, clutches, or crawls are reported, however binned values are given for some sites where no exact estimates were available. Region- and species-specific conversion factors are used to convert between these different count types to put values into bins for display purposes only. This ensures that no nesting sites are dropped from the display when viewing the data using different types of counts. The converted values themselves are never displayed, and users should refer to the individual data records to view the original counts reported. When all species are displayed, colony size is used to color the points with the color white representing unquantified sites. The most recent record for the species nesting in the greatest abundance at that site is used to determine the color. Nesting sites containing multiple species are represented with a circle. SWOT reports and non-interactive maps (originally published in the SWOT reports) are available online at http://www.seaturtlestatus.org. For any questions about the database, the SWOT project, contributions or data access issues, please contact us at swotdata@gmail.com and a SWOT member will assist you. Inquiries can also be made as to the availability of data for use in research projects. The SWOT Scientific Advisory Board will release nest location data for use in projects that meet our review requirements, however, individual data provider permissions will need to be acquired by any parties wishing to utilize population level data.
Citations	SWOT Database Online. DiMatteo, A., Fujioka, E., Wallace, B., Hutchinson, B., Cleary, J., Halpin, P. Data provided by the SWOT Team. 2009. See individual records for citations for particular nesting sites. World Wide Web electronic publication. Read, A.J., Halpin, P.N., Crowder, L.B., Best, B.D., Fujioka, E.(Editors). 2007. OBIS-SEAMAP: mapping marine mammals, birds and turtles. World Wide Web electronic publication.
Most recent report	SWOT Report vol IV. Discovering the flatback: Australia’s own sea turtle. 2009. Available at http://www.seaturtlestatus.org
Previous reports	SWOT Report vol I. Burning Issues in Sea Turtle Conservation… Leatherback Sea Turtles of the World. 2009. Available at http://www.seaturtlestatus.org SWOT Report vol III. Where the Hawksbills Are. 2008. Available at http://www.seaturtlestatus.org SWOT Report vol II. A Global Glimpse of Loggerhead Nesting. 2007. Available at http://www.seaturtlestatus.org

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Suggested citation for OBIS-SEAMAP: Read, A.J., Halpin, P.N., Crowder, L.B., Best, B.D., Fujioka, E.(Editors). 2009. OBIS-SEAMAP: mapping marine mammals, birds and turtles. World Wide Web electronic publication. http://seamap.env.duke.edu, Accessed on November 23, 2009.
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