State of the World's Sea Turtles, The

SWOT - the State of the World's Sea Turtles - is a partnership led by Marine Flagship Species Program at the Oceanic Society and the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG), and supported by the OBIS-SEAMAP project at the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (MGEL), Duke University. This online database and mapping application is built with sea turtle nesting and telemetry data contributed to SWOT since 2004 and also incorporates earlier efforts that produced the WIDECAST nesting database. Since 2012, the data collection and database management are conducted by the OBIS-SEAMAP team at the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University.

Currently, SWOT collects data from a network of more than 550 people and projects (SWOT team) for the only comprehensive, global database of sea turtle nesting sites and satellite telemetry data. The SWOT team has provided global nesting locations and satellite telemetry data of all seven marine turtle species: green, leatherback, loggerhead, hawksbill, flatback, olive ridley, and Kemp's ridley. These data have been highlighted here and in annual SWOT reports, available freely in print and online. Furthermore, SWOT supports recommendations for monitoring effort schemes (minimum data standards or MDS) that will allow for comparison of long-term nesting abundance and trend estimates for regional and global populations of sea turtle species. All data contributed to SWOT must include MDS level information to facilitate a standardized global monitoring system for sea turtles.

In addition to collating sea turtle nesting and telemetry data, SWOT provides other geospatial sea turtle data, including species regional management units, georeferenced sea turtle mtDNA and nDNA sampling sites, and a nesting habitat suitability layer. These files can be viewed and downloaded for analyses from the SWOT mapping application (http://seamap.env.duke.edu/swot) once the OBIS-SEAMAP Terms of Use are agreed upon.