If you or your NGO is considering starting a new or replacing your current database for sea turtle data, then please check out this initiative.

Earlier I introduced the wish at Osa Conservation‘s sea turtle program for some solution to unify data entry by volunteers during and/or after their beach patrols. In part 5, I will look at TURT which is a crowdsourcing system.

Probably launched in 2015, there is an app for iPhone and Android that uses crowdsourcing to collect basic data about turtle sightings. Users who sight a turtle are asked to take a picture and upload it through the app together with basic data about the sighting: which turtle species, GPS location, weather conditions, day and time.

The data ends up in the hands of ProTECTOR, Protective Turtle Ecology Center for Training Outreach and Research. It is a firm based in California that focuses mostly on Honduras. The app was written by Dustin Baumbach, who at that time was a PhD student and marine researcher at Loma Linda University, also in California. (Esri newsroom)

I only briefly mention it here, because it shows that crowdsourcing through mobile apps is of course a way to collect data about sea turtles. However as a system to systematically collect data about particular beaches it lacks a lot of depth in data. And like with the Turtle Tracker, one needs to be on-line to work with the app.

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The series of posts to which this post belongs is also published as one page.