An essay written in early 2021 for a conservation course final.
Scaling Green Turtle Conservation through a Professional Network
The Green Turtle Chelonia mydas is a truly international species. Present across the globe, the species was once found to number in the millions in the Caribbean alone (Spotilla 2004). Unfortunately, through overexploitation both at sea and on their nesting beaches, their numbers have now dwindled to a tiny fraction of what they once were. So substantial has been the population loss that it is now incredibly difficult to even establish their ecological role (Chaloupka 2007). Thankfully during the 1960’s attention was drawn to the species and the subsequent conservation actions gave it the charismatic fame the species now holds today. Since then, a wide variety of organizations and projects have popped up around the globe to conserve this wonderful species. From the data published by SWOT (The State of The World’s Sea Turtles) to individual projects protecting specific beaches around the world, the extent and impact of turtle conservation is broad.
Yet, Chelonia mydas is still listed as endangered by the IUCN. To understand why this is, one must understand their life cycle. First, while marine organisms, mydas, like all marine turtles, must come onto beaches in order to lay their eggs. They do this with high specificity and this therefore represents a huge vulnerability to the species. It is not terribly difficult to determine where a 400lb animal is hauling out or has hauled out onto a beach, and once that information is ascertained one knows precisely where a nutrient rich clutch of eggs can be found. The result is that it is not uncommon for beaches where turtles come to lay their eggs to experience near to 100% take. Even in countries where this is theoretically banned by law, there are vigorous black markets for both turtle eggs and mydas meat which for a large part of history was a delicacy that even the most reputable herpetologists enjoyed (Pritchard 2011).
For those eggs that do manage to hatch it becomes a death race for those young hatchlings to make it off the beach, let alone survive once they are out in the water. After that turtles have to survive to an age of sexual maturity that is measured in decades meaning that turnover in the population is slow (Spotilla 2004). This makes them an especially difficult species to manage because it can be unclear for many years at a time that populations are not reinforcing their egg laying capability and then when the old females die suddenly the population collapses (Spotilla 2004).
As if these threats weren’t enough, turtles are also victims of bycatch from fishing. Combine this long, vulnerable life history with the international nature of the turtles (and all the issues that brings for conservation management) and it should be clear why Chelonia mydas is still endangered even with the relatively mature conservation practice surrounding it for even though there are plenty of international treaties protecting the turtles such as the Memorandum of Understanding for the Indian Ocean or the Inter-American Convention for the Americas (for full names see literature cited), plenty of successful management cases (just browse SWOT’s yearly issues), and turtle excluder devices (TEDs), actually managing to protect the species as a whole and enforce the law at the seeming infinitude of beaches these turtles use for breeding is still a challenge of scale and collaboration. Indeed the central thesis of this report is that the methods for turtle conservation are already well known and well demonstrated and that the central issue in turtle conservation now is simply finding ways to apply and distribute these methods at scale.
Central to this scaling up is the involvement of local and indigenous communities around the globe. Without the buy-in and leadership from local communities it is simply impossible to manage these ecosystems and enforce conservation best practices all the way down to the local level. Communities also present valuable partners in conservation because they are the ones with the most direct stake. While governments and other larger organizations can easily be distracted from the value of one place by “larger” concerns through a country or international community, communities with direct stake in particular and local ecosystems are best placed to act as champions and defenders of those ecosystems (Muurmans 2011). Furthermore successful programs of conservation develop ways to promote symbiosis between local peoples and the resource to be conserved, transforming the act of conservation from one of exclusion to one of value which further incentivizes locals to protect their ecosystems.
This philosophy suggests a useful model for thinking about conservation progress. First communities start from a place of poor management due either to insecurity or ignorance of some kind. Then through education and adaptation move to one of sustainable management of either prior practice and/or new forms of value. Finally with this value well established communities then inevitably have to defend their newfound values against encroaching development (like beach side hotels or commercial fishing). An example of this model would be going from poorly managed egg collection all the way through to sustainable ecotourism.
This model of driving value at the community level to create truly scalable conservation is the model taken herein.
To summarize the preceding sections, conservation of Chelonia mydas is a problem of scaling up and adapting already demonstrated methods for creating symbiosis between communities and their marine turtles across the globe.
So how to achieve this globalization? Conservation of mydas, being such an international species, hinges on issues of physical distances and disparate cultures and languages. Obviously in light of this there will be no one size fits all solution to protect turtles around the globe. Instead it will take creative human minds to adapt the old solutions to new situations. Specifically, it must focus on connecting those with demonstrated successes to those who can provide the context for adaptation to new areas. The teacher apprentice paradigm is perfect for this. In addition this approach also provides the scalability needed. If a single teacher can guide several interested allies in other communities to successes of their own, then each of those allies can mentor people of their own providing a potential exponential increase. This also provides for continued cultural spread and adaptation because while the linguistic or cultural distance between each individual pairing need not be large, the whole chain can comprehend vast distances.
Obviously for mentees to truly learn and grow they must have the resources to succeed at their projects. Therefore there is a third relationship that has to be developed here as well. The relationship between mentor mentee pairings and resourcing entities. These resourcing entities could be sourced from government, NGOs, private philanthropists, and so on. Therefore this solution must not only be capable of matching mentors and mentees, but also matching them up with the resources they need for success.
To provide a more formal summary of the above we have identified five key problems that need to be solved in order to provide scale in this manner. First there needs to be a mechanism for finding and reaching out to new mentees. Second those mentees need to be relevantly paired with mentors with demonstrated success. Third there needs to be a mechanism for efficiently discovering and gaining the aid of resourcing entities. Fourth this solution must provide for the creation of and tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) that define success of each project. Fifth and finally this solution must encourage mentees to become mentors themselves and travel through the conservation stages outlined above from unmanaged resources to highly defensible sources of community value.
Before moving onto proposing a few avenues for creating such a solution we must answer the question of how to measure success in such a system. Because projects interior to this network will be tracking their own KPIs on the health of the ecosystems and sites they are managing, the project’s measures of success will instead focus on the health and growth of the network itself. The most relevant statistic to the question of scale will be measures of platform engagement. How many new mentees, mentors, and resource entities are joining the platform? How engaged are they? What is the lifecycle of a new mentee? How many end up becoming mentors themselves? How far do they get in moving towards highly defensible systems of community value? These kinds of metrics will establish how well the platform is achieving its goal of scaling through networking. Equally as important will be measures of individual project success. How well funded are those projects and can resources be acquired more easily through the platform? What are the success rates of projects? Do they actually achieve their goals or do they lose momentum and vanish? Through measuring network effectiveness in this manner platform managers can keep track of the pulse of the network.
With this guidance on platform goals and KPIs we can now propose three methods for achieving the desired result. The first takes a legislative perspective, the second a societal one, and the final is a technological approach.
First there already exist several international marine turtle conservation treaties (see treaties listed in literature cited for reference) that specifically make reference to a need to collaborate amongst signatories and to encourage other nations in the relevant zones to become signatories themselves. Yet, these same treaties do not have specific language for how that is to be accomplished. Therefore our first solution is to take the project philosophy, structure, goals, and KPIs defined and develop a clear and specific charter subsidiary organization under one or more of the aforementioned treaties. The specificity of such a charter, provided as an amendment within one or more of these treaties, would go a long way to improving the collaboration amongst signatories.
A second means for developing our solution would be to develop a professional society. Chapters could be set up across the globe each of which would use the specific philosophy, goals, and KPIs described above in their charter. Each chapter could be responsible for discovery in its local region, for the assignment of mentors to mentees, and for the development of a network between relevant resource entities and the member projects. As chapters grew they could bud out into new chapters that could in turn pursue discovery and growth of their own. By having such a society whose singular purpose is the development of this network the various entities in turtle conservation could be brought together and new relationships developed.
Finally we present a technical approach. The main goal here is to provide a forum to make meaningful connections. To do this a professional social network could be built that has the following features. First working groups to connect and collect the various actors and representatives on any project. This would include the mentors and mentees, any NGOs or philanthropic organizations or persons, and any other relevant stakeholders. There would be two kinds of working groups - one for discovery and one for projects. Built into this would be search functionality for finding relevant connections/projects for both the individuals on the network and the projects themselves. This would facilitate quickly finding resources, mentors, mentees, etc. In the future this search engine data could even be used to build a recommendation system for automatic referrals. Engagement could initially be achieved and maintained by partnering with organizations like SWOT who already help resource small projects throughout the globe. Features could be built into the working groups to make tracking, communication, and knowledge sharing easier and more flexible for this already existent network. Data on potential site locations could be given and tracked within working groups dedicated to discovery. Then the search functionality within the application could drive further connections between people already on the network who would otherwise be relevant to one another. The search functionality could also allow NGOs or philanthropic organizations or persons to find and provide resourcing to projects (much like the popular site Kickstarter). Over time as the tool became more commonplace additional organizations and governments could be invited to join (or might find it themselves) and discovery teams would continue to add new people to the application. As the application scaled, search functionality could be supported by recommendation systems as well. Finally translation services could be built into the app from day one to alleviate communication challenges and provide further globalization. Through these features a professional social network of working groups and resourcing entities would be established that would drive and support globalization of marine turtle conservation.
While it is apparent that these three solutions are in no way exclusive (indeed they synchronize quite nicely) the third option is likely the best starting point. The problem of building effective networks of people; providing the tools to search through and make successful matches in such a network; providing a centralized location for communication, collaboration, and tracking; handling the exchange of resources; and solving global communication roadblocks are all at this point well handled by technologies developed by the corporate world. Indeed many of these solutions are either open source or can be purchased as a service making development easiest from a technological perspective. Indeed if either the legislative or social approach wanted the most effective means for achieving their goals a technological solution would need to be developed. As just one example consider helping individual projects find resourcing. If you include private citizens, NGOs, government organizations, and philanthropic organizations, the total sum of options would be enormous. Even if an individual was responsible for providing recommendations, they themselves would need an effective search tool to carve through all of the information. In the author’s opinion the technological solution would be a prerequisite or immediate consequence of either of the other solutions. Indeed if a solution was developed as proof of concept and had demonstrated success it might make the establishment of a legal charter or professional society much easier.
These solutions also represent an improvement on the current state of Chelonia mydas conservation in that they do not replace the old solutions but instead recognize their demonstrated success and just bring together the people and entities required and technologies needed to effectively drive scaling of these solutions across the globe. By following the teacher apprentice model, facilitating discovery of new allies, and streamlining connections with resourcing entities, this solution takes the old solutions and applies them across the globe in a manner that should see multiplicative if not exponential growth. This solution develops new conservationists and equips them with the tools they need for success.
Initial development of a POC could be done over a summer with a group of 10-15 interns for $500k. Then to supplement continued contributions from the students two full time developers could be hired over 4 years for $1.5 million. A $500k cloud compute budget would suffice over 4 years. $1 million would be set aside to connect remote areas in the initial POC. This would leave $1.5 million to pitch the POC to a long time owner and cover unexpected costs.
In conclusion, conservation of Chelonia mydas has seen many important and meaningful successes across the globe but true globalization remains a problem to be solved. By facilitating the development of a teacher apprentice model, easing the process of resourcing, and facilitating discovery of allies through a professional social network, the author believes modern technology can help provide the solution to facilitating globalization.
Literature Cited:
Spotilla - Sea Turtles (2004) John Hopkins University Press
Chaloupka - The Mystery of Their Purpose: what are the ecological roles of sea turtles, and how many turtles are needed to fulfill those roles? (2007) SWOT
Pritchard - The Most Valuable Reptile in the World: the green turtle (2011) SWOT
Muurman - Community Conservation Programs Built to Last (2011) SWOT
Treaties Referenced
Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles
Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation and Management of Marine Turtles and Their Habitats of the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia
Further Reading for Specific Case Studies of Successful Conservation
https://www.seaturtlestatus.org/swot-report
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