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Key changes in the IUCN structure that are pertinent to the MTSG occurred during the week, including the election of a new SSC Chair, Dr. Simon Stuart, and a new IUCN President, Ashok Khosla. We wish them the best in their new appointments.

Burning Issues Workshop 4: The 4th Burning Issues Workshop (BI-4) was hosted in August in Shepherdstown, WV, USA, and is the most recent in an on-going series of expert gatherings at which the MTSG is fine-tuning global priorities for sea turtle conservation.

The MTSG began to conduct Burning Issues Workshops to tap into the collective millennia of life experiences of its membership and we are committed to continuing to use these gatherings to look at different angles of sea turtle conservation in a pragmatic way. This series of annual workshops derives its name from an exercise conducted among 30-some seasoned sea turtle experts gathered in West Virginia in December 2003, which resulted in a “Top Ten List” of the world’s most threatened sea turtle populations. This Top Ten List has been broadly communicated within the sea turtle community through lectures and publications and has been disseminated in several languages as a poster produced by the MTSG, CI, ProPeninsula and others.

The 2nd Burning Issues Workshop (BI-2, August 2005) further refined the Top Ten List, adding background status information to each of the Top Ten, and it also added a first-draft of Critical Research Needs that highlighted areas where greater study is needed to understand poorly-known turtle populations. BI-2 also defined a set of 5 Hazards, “threats that will result in decline, local extinction and/or prevent the recovery of sea turtles,” that have also been widely publicized and have become part of the jargon of our community.

BI-3 created a new structure to improve delivery and quality of IUCN Red List assessments, and the 26 experts present designed a survey that has since been implemented among the full MTSG membership to determine the relative impacts of the 5 Hazards in all the regions of the Earth where sea turtles occur. BI-3 also took a broad look at the Major Un-answered Questions of sea turtle natural history, as a means to better direct future research efforts within our community. The results of this undertaking are described in a special feature in SWOT Report, Vol. 2 (see “Unsolved Mysteries: The Sea Turtle Files,” pp. 6-13).

Priority-setting for sea turtles must be done at the scale of management units that take into account multiple factors such as population genetics and geographic ranges, as these are the units at which extinction poses the most pertinent threat, and at which most conservation actions can be implemented. For some sea turtle species and populations, genetic and geographic range definitions are relatively advanced, while for others a good deal of work must still be done. The MTSG’s Burning Issues Workshops continue to support the refinement of population definitions for all sea turtle species and serve to extract up-to-the-moment expert opinion (since much of what is known is still unpublished) on the top issues of importance to preventing turtle extinctions and conserving marine habitats.

The BI-4 Workshop had two primary objectives:

1. To define sea turtle populations/management units for the purposes of conservation priority-setting, and;
2. To develop specific criteria and a process for ranking/prioritizing the conservation status of all sea turtle populations/management units on a global scale.

These two objectives represent a pretty tall order, yet the team took-on the challenge with gusto. The BI-4 participants agreed upon definitions and a framework for describing management units for all sea turtle species, taking into account all available information on population genetics, tag returns, and satellite telemetry. Following this, the BI-4 group began development of scientifically sound and mutually agreeable criteria for defining priority sites for sea turtles at the global scale, priority management units, and methods by which to rank those sites and populations by order of importance based on multiple conservation objectives—another major “first” for the sea turtle conservation movement. We are also designing processes that will assure that priority-setting products are dynamic, regularly updated, and that they allow for input from a wide variety of sources. Consensus will always be a holy grail when it comes to priority setting, yet we believe that by including a broad array of expert opinions we can approach it.

We would like to extend a special thanks to all the MTSG members and others who participated in BI-4: Alberto Abreu, Brian Bowen, Raquel Briseño, Paolo Casale, Alice Costa, Naamal De Silva, Alejandro Fallabrino, Elena Finkbeiner, Brian Hutchinson, Colin Limpus, Neca Marcovaldi, Andrea Margit, Jeanne Mortimer, Jack Musick, Nicolas Pilcher, Earl Possardt, Joca Thome, Sebastian Troëng, Bryan Wallace, Lucy Yarnell, and Blair Witherington—with a special thanks to Michelle Pico and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for their financial and technical support, and to the standing committee for the Burning Issues Workshop Series: Alan Bolten, Milani Chaloupka, and Rod Mast.

First MTSG Regional Vice-Chairs Meeting: On August 15, 2008 eight of the thirteen MTSG Regional Vice-Chairs gathered in Shepherdstown, WV to discuss a variety of MTSG issues and take advantage of their mutual presence for the Burning Issues 4 meeting. A number of topics were discussed including MTSG member reappointment, communications, and the role of the vice chairs. Notes from this meeting will be circulated to the entire MTSG membership in the near future for review.

Dhamra Port: The Dhamra Port project continues to make positive strides in conservation. Nick visited the Port in late September to review progress in implementation of conservation efforts, and to discuss further work. Construction of the port is well underway, and the site has shielded most lights as per their commitment after the earlier lighting mission (see MTN 121). Those lights which were unshielded were new, and the Port promised to have those shielded as soon as possible. Several changes in dredgers have occurred over the past few months, but all gear has arrived to Dhamra fitted with deflectors and screening devices as directed through the dredging consultations. As an offshoot of the dredging operations, which has 100% observer coverage, the team at Dhamra have developed a street theatre group to educate children and local villages concerning the plight of marine turtles. The troupe is made up of observers who are not on duty (the project currently employs over ten observers who rotate time on the ships), and the street performance has been received with great warmth by the children in the local villages. Nick held a ‘biology of turtles’ update for those who were on leave during his visit, in order to answer questions the observers were being posed by the schoolchildren – many of which had them stumped! A technical cum shareholders meeting originally scheduled for September has been rescheduled to the end of November to adjust for conflicting schedules amongst several of those who needed to attend. Invitations for the meeting have gone out to MTSG members in India.

State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Advances: The MTSG was a founding partner in the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) initiative that has now been growing for more than four years. Dr. Bryan Wallace now chairs the SWOT Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), which has recently updated its volunteer membership to include top experts in sea turtle data standards and statistics: Milani Chaloupka, Scott Eckert, Marc Girondot, Colin Limpus, Suzanne Livingstone, Neca Marcovaldi, Nicolas Pilcher, Jeff Seminoff, and Andrea Whiting. SWOT also hired a part-time Database Coordinator in July 2008, Andrew DiMatteo, who will oversee the acquisition and management of the data used to produce SWOT maps. Andrew is based in the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (MGEL) at Duke University and is helping reinvigorate SWOT’s long-term partnership with MGEL and OBIS-SEAMAP, another of the original SWOT partners. This important partnership allows us to overlay our valuable data on sea turtles with other global-scale data sets on marine mammals, seabirds, fish stocks, bycatch, etc. for better conservation priority-setting and analyses. Duke’s MGEL is recognized as one of the top geospatial analysis groups in the world, and Andrew will be central in ensuring that SWOT’s mapping stays on the cutting edge. Both Bryan and Andrew are also leading SWOT’s efforts at developing minimum data standards for monitoring projects and related statistical models to improve our ability to detect and monitor population trends over time (see MTN 121:36-38 for more information).

Preparations for SWOT Report—The State of the World’s Sea Turtles, Vol. 4, are now in full swing with an intended release in February 2009 at the 29th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation in Brisbane, Australia. This issue will feature the biology of flatback sea turtles among a variety of articles on other recent findings and successes in sea turtle research and conservation from around the world.

Re-Establishing the MTSG Membership for the New IUCN Quadrennium: Every four years marks a new term—quadrennium—for the IUCN, in which the entire organizational structure is wiped clean and all positions are re-appointed. This begins at the top with positions such as the IUCN president, councilors, and the chairs of the various commissions like the Species Survival Commission, and eventually leads down to the appointment of the heads of the various Specialist Groups and Task Forces, and ultimately the members of these bodies.

As mentioned above, a new SSC Chair has already been appointed (Simon Stuart) during the World Conservation Congress, and we now await our own reappointment as MTSG co-chairs before we are able to begin re-appointing the MTSG membership. Members are invited individually for reappointment in the group. We anticipate that this process will begin within the next few months, and we will keep the current membership informed via the MTSG email listserv.