Conservation Priorities Portfolio 2.0: Dashboard

The Conservation Priorities Portfolio 2.0 (CPP), or “Updated Conservation Status and Priorities for Marine Turtles”, is part of the IUCN-SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group’s Burning Issues 7 (BI-7) workshop and evaluates the risks, threats, and conservation capacity in each of the marine turtle “Regional Management Unit” (RMU). This paper, currently in review, is an update to the original 2011 paper, “Global Conservation Priorities for Marine Turtles” and is the culmination of years of work by 137 experts in 50 countries.

To determine the most vulnerable RMUs, we scored population risks including population abundance, long-term and short-term population trends, rookery vulnerability, and genetic diversity as well as threats by fisheries bycatch, human consumption of turtles and their eggs, coastal development, pollution and pathogens, and climate change for each RMU. This iteration also added scores for conservation capacity which included enforcement capacity, resource availability, coordination capacity, technical expertise, and socio-economic index.

The goal of CPP is to identify the sea turtle populations that are most at risk, pinpoint what threats are responsible for this status, and what level of conservation capacity exists for those populations. With this information, sea turtle conservationists can more effectively target their conservation efforts and allocate their resources to the threats and populations that need it the most.

The following dashboard allows users to interact with the results of CPP and explore the threats, risks, and conservation capacity levels for individual or groups of sea turtle RMUs.