Demographic Studies of Sea Turtles

archived

This synopsis is the full annopuncement. The tasks to be performed under this agreement are as follows: (1) Extend or adapt current statistical methodology, design concepts, and software to sea turtle problems, to be able to estimate stage specific survival, fidelity, and movement probabilities, conditional probability of nesting (equivalent to remigration interval), recruitment rate to the breeding life history state, abundance of turtles in the study area (e.g., nesting population), total adult female abundance (those nesting and those that are skipping nesting), proportion of nesters that are neophytes versus remigrants, and /number of nests laid within a season; (2) Use these tools and simulation to evaluate minimum sample sizes needed to achieve desired precision levels for a variety of scenarios pertinent to various sea turtle species, based on published papers and experience with hawksbills and leatherbacks in the Caribbean; and (3) Articulate the results to the sea turtle community, in a report and other publications.

High