Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Nesting Sites

In partnership with more than 120 Data Providers, this spatial database of nesting habitat - for six species of Caribbean sea turtles - is the most comprehensive for any region of the world, with 1,311 identified nesting sites in 43 Wider Caribbean nations and territories, including Bermuda to the north and Brazil to the south. Because some sites host nesting by multiple species, 2,535 species-specific sites are identified. Of these, 77% can be categorized in terms of abundance: <25, 25-100, 100-500, 500-1,000, or >1,000 nesting crawls per year. Data for each nesting site are standardized and binned abundance estimates based on crawl (nesting and non-nesting attempts), not nest, counts so that the atlas could embrace all available survey information. We find that: (i) large nesting colonies are surprisingly rare, with nesting sites receiving more than 1,000 crawls per year ranging from 0.4% (hawksbill) to 7.0% (Kemp's ridley); (ii) for any species, roughly half of all known nesting sites support fewer than 25 crawls (fewer than 10 reproductively active females) per year; and (iii) hawksbill and green turtles are the least known, with 33% and 24%, respectively, of all known nesting sites associated with unknown crawl abundances. The database highlights both strengths and weaknesses in the region's capacity to manage and monitor the sea turtle resource. For example, while the majority (70%) of these 43 nations and territories fully protect sea turtles and most of the region's largest nesting colonies are censused at regular intervals (often daily), it's also clear that consistent sea turtle population monitoring effort is lacking in most areas, recent data are extremely scarce in some jurisdictions, and virtually nothing is known of the status and distribution of important foraging habitat. Note: Nesting sites for the purposes of this analysis are defined as operational management units, rather than strict geographic entities (i.e. sometimes smaller and sometimes larger than discrete sandy shorelines). Nesting site locations represent entire beaches and should be considered as the approximate midpoint of nesting beach. Please refer to Dow et al. (2007) for more detail. Full copies of the electronic version of the dataset (Microsoft Excel format) can be obtained by emailing the database manager, Wendy Dow at wed3@duke.edu.