By Sara Steffen | Conservation Coordinator
Winter has set in again and our turtles are hibernating. While this is a quiet time of the year for field work, it’s a busy time in the office. This winter we will be working on promoting our citizen science project. Currently we are collecting photos taken by individuals to identify turtles in their backyards. We need a lot more data to make any sense of what is happening in urban areas with turtles, and we need a better way to document the turtles. Photographs are helpful, but when you start getting 100s or 1000s of photographs, someone has to look through each one to determine if any of them are the same turtle. This can be quite tedious, even for an intern!
We have two goals for this winter. Our first goal is to create a neighborhood watch program for the citizen science program. This includes contacting individuals who have shown great interest in our citizen science project and who may want to become more of a leader in box turtle conservation. These individuals will recruit others in or around their neighborhood to get involved with the citizen science project. This will help us create a better picture of urban box turtles and help us teach our conservation lessons to protect other box turtles.
Our second goal, which will not be completed by the end of winter, is to create a better tool for recognizing turtles. Instead of using our interns to go through 100s of photos, our hope is that we can create a photo ID app (with help from a non-profit called WildTrack) to recognize shell patterns in individual turtles. Each box turtle has a unique shell print, similar to our finger prints. If we can get the app software to recognize these shell prints, we can start using photography instead of physically marking individual turtles. This app software would help us standardize the photos we receive and also help us get a more complete idea of what is happening to box turtles all throughout North Carolina. It would also allow anyone with a cell phone to capture turtles and add data to our project. One of our conservation interns, Kelly, stated “I can’t wait for this software to be available! It will be so much easier to organize photographs and collect and analyze data.”
Currently, we are only studying turtles in the triangle of North Carolina, but if this project and phone app are successful we hope that this project can be used anywhere box turtles (or other reptiles) are found! We will need your support to print door hangers for our neighborhood watch program, create the photo ID app software, and to educate citizens. If you can help, please donate now. We need your support for the conservation of box turtles!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
