Leatherback Tracking in South Africa

Islameta Group - Department of Biology, University of Pisa, Italy

The Indian Ocean has many breeding areas for sea turtles, the southernmost ones being on the Maputaland coast of KwaZulu-Natal, where leatherback turtles nest in large numbers thanks to long-lasting protection programs. For the leatherback this is the only known nesting site in the entire western Indian Ocean. At the end of the reproductive season, leatherbacks undertake migrations towards disparate feeding areas. To contribute to their conservation, the migratory behavior of these animals has been studied by satellite telemetry for several years. This species turned out to frequent widely dispersed areas ranging from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mozambique Channel, performing large-scale wandering probably due to the leatherbacks' feeding habits on macroplankton such as jellyfish and salps. These movements have been shown to be heavily influenced by the main oceanic currents and oceanographic mesoscale features occurring in the areas crossed.

Documenting the extent of the post-nesting movements of leatherbacks nesting in South Africa and understand their behavior.

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Overview

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
datetime	Date and time of observation
latitude	Latitude of observation
longitude	Longitude of observation
sp_obs	Species observed
sp_scientific
sp_tsn	Species ITIS TSN
obs_count	Number of animals observed
series
lc
oid	Unique ID number (generated by SEAMAP)