New publication: Green turtle GPS tracking

With the help of my NOAA research team and our partners, I led a recently published paper detailing patterns in habitat use for East Pacific green turtles at a foraging area in San Diego Bay, California. Multiple indicators point to population growth for green turtles in this region, and more turtles in our waters means we have a changing management context. Our paper uses GPS locations collected via satellite telemetry to document how turtles use and select for certain environmental variables—notably eelgrass meadows. We hope that our findings can help inform local and regional efforts to limit human impacts. Model predictions in space, as shown in the figure above, could represent an especially valuable tool.