Saving Our Snake-Necked Turtle: community information session

GeoCatch and Murdoch University are looking for community volunteers to track our snake-necked turtles.

Saving Our Snake-Necked Turtle (SOSNT) is a citizen science-driven conservation project that aims to upskill the community in turtle monitoring and protection to ensure the southwestern snake-necked turtle flourishes into the future. The project will identify hotspots where threats to the species are occurring, enabling targeted management actions to be developed and implemented.

The ‘Turtle Tracker’ project was originally developed by the turtle team at Murdoch University. Starting their research in Perth, the Turtle Trackers are now ready to expand to the South West with the help of a City of Busselton grant from the You Choose grants program. And we need your help!

Community involvement is critical to help us understand the distribution and status of the southwestern snake-necked turtle, whose range covers a large part of the south-west of Western Australia. Citizen science can help lead to early detection of species decline and also recovery in places where conservation strategies are being trialed. Monitoring by citizen scientists helps us by identifying:

• where the species is living
• what it is doing
• where the problems are (like road trauma and predation)
• if some areas are used more by the species than others

Identifying a problem is the first step towards fixing it. Training citizen scientists to participate in conservation research increases the effectiveness of our work to protect biodiversity.

Turtle Ecologist and project manager from Murdoch University, Dr Anthony Santoro, will be leading the information session. Dr Anthony and his team will give a background on the project so far and talk about how you can become a volunteer.

So who can be a SOSNT Citizen Scientist? Anyone who has access to a mobile phone or computer can become a trained Turtle Tracker, and download and use the tracking software TurtleSAT.

This project is delivered by GeoCatch, through funding from the City of Busselton’s You Choose program.