Marine turtle conservation 597


FIG. 5 Perceived challenges to addressing illegal harvest, use and trade of marine turtles, and the actions recommended for addressing such challenges, from 91 participants. Participants reported the challenges in response to an open-ended question, and summary themes were attributed to their responses. The three most common themes identified were fisheries management, enforcement and legislation. Participants’ suggestions for how to address the challenges relating to fisheries management and to enforcement and legislation are displayed below each figure part. EIAs, environmental impact assessments; IUU, illegal, unreported and unregulated.


practices; and encouraging leadership from government and communities.


Lessons learnt from conservation experiences


Of the total 103 participants, 72%had been directly involved within the last 10 years in a marine turtle conservation pro- ject addressing illegal activities. When considering this ex- perience and asked about strategic management options for the success of similar projects in the future, the most common needs mentioned related to planning processes, site monitoring, and background research (Table 2). Sev- eral participants (61%of 72) emphasized the importance of collaborative management and planning with affected local stakeholders; 17% referred to the importance of ensur- ing continuous monitoring presence at sites where turtles are typically harvested; and 11% noted the importance of adequate preliminary research on local socio-economic, cultural and ecological contexts to inform project design.


Discussion


Using participants’ perceptions to explore illegal harvest, use and trade, its challenges, lessons learnt and solutions,


we identified global priorities for marine turtle conservation interventions. Obtaining reliable information on illegal ac- tivities is challenging, and the opinions of experts evolve over time (Martin et al., 2011). The perceptions we have re- ported may have been subject to biases, including from field experiences, areas of expertise, and the degree of both of these (Donlan et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2019). Expert knowledge is likely to be influenced by a range of factors that are unique to the individual experts, making it difficult to achieve impartiality. Further work should therefore seek to validate our findings through empirical research, and try to better understand how individual experience, perspec- tives and goals influence experts’ opinions on wildlife con- servation trends, needs and priorities. Moreover, although we attempted to attenuate any biases of convenience sam- pling with snowball sampling, we did not achieve equitable coverage of experience levels and geographical distribution, which limits the generalization of our findings. For example, we recruited fewer participants for the Western Indian Ocean and Mediterranean regions than for the other three regions. Our findings suggest that illegal harvest, use and trade


continue to occur in a number of countries, with specimens being harvested largely by local people. Although these


Oryx, 2022, 56(4), 592–600 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320001210


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