598 L. L. Lopes et al
TABLE 2 Atotal of 72 survey participants had been directly involved in marine turtle conservation projects aiming to curb illegal harvest, use and trade during the previous 10 years. Of those, 64 suggested key management and strategic options for the success of any future projects, summarized here. Frequency refers to the number of individual participant responses that identified the need for a given key management or strategic option, and per cent is calculated in relation to the total of 72 participants.
Key management & strategic options
Collaborative management & planning with locally affected stakeholders
Frequency (%)
44 (61) Example quotes
‘Try to involve all relevant entities in any action, including government, community, NGOs, etc. This provides a diversity of opinions & can help tailor any initiatives to a given situation, rather than simply using something that might have worked in another location. Also, need to be sure that everyone involved understands the nature of the issue, & the legal situation, as misinformation can be very damaging & restrictive to success.’ ‘Always invite the local communities participating in the illegal activities to provide their input & perspective & work with them to achieve solutions. Think of what is important to the community (access to clean water, a local school or ecotourism)
...help them work on improving those needs... insert the message of sea turtle conservation around solving those needs so
that...conservation is seen.. .as an improvement to their lives in the community.’
Ensuring continuous monitoring at key sites where turtles are typically harvested
Undertaking adequate preliminary research on
local socio-economic, cultural & ecological contexts to inform project design
12 (17) 8 (11)
‘
...teams of research assistants on the beach every night during the nesting
season...are a powerful deterrent to egg poaching & illegal take.. .’
‘
...conduct an assessment of the subsistence & semi-commercial harvest to quantify & characterize sea turtle exploitation at the local, provincial & national level, including trade & marketing patterns, & the importance to livelihoods of the income derived from sea turtle exploitation.’ ‘
...collecting robust quantitative data on the trade so that the level of the problem can be established. One needs to quantify that there is a problem first & foremost before looking into how to address it & what level of effort/resources will be required.’
conclusions result fromthe views of a relatively limited num- ber of experts, they align with evidence from recent studies reporting illegal activities (Egypt, Boura et al., 2016;Cape Verde, Hancock et al., 2017; Costa Rica, Harrison et al., 2017; Peru,Quiñones et al., 2017;Colombia, Indonesia,Mada- gascar, Malaysia, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Panama, CITES, 2019). The frequent of illegal trade at the national level compared to that reported at international level may reflect the limited capacity of international regulatory frame- works, such as CITES, to counter illegal wildlife trade at the national level. However, overall, many participants con- sidered trade to have decreased in the previous 5 years, supporting the findings of other research (e.g. Boura et al., 2016; Hancock et al., 2017; Harrison et al., 2017;CITES, 2019). Notwithstanding, shifts from traditional to online trade in marine turtles have been reported for some regions (CITES, 2019). Online marine turtle trade has been reported in Central American and South-east Asian countries (Harrison et al., 2017; CITES, 2019). However, participants were generally unfamiliar with this type of trade in these countries. This could be explained by the relatively novel, emerging nature of online wildlife crime and the difficulty of tracking and quantifying this type of trade (May, 2017). Although participants considered addressing illegal ac- tivities a priority for marine turtle conservation, current
efforts to address these were believed to be insufficient by many participants. Illegal harvest, use and trade were con- sidered serious threats that need to be addressed for marine turtles across the regions studied, and particularly in the Mediterranean. This is unexpected, considering that illegal activities are of little concern in the Mediterranean compared to other regions (Boura et al., 2016;Casaleetal., 2018). Perhaps there are inflated perceptions about the severity of the threat in this region because it has been historically less dependent on marine turtle exploitation compared to other regions. That illegal activities were considered a less important and less urgent threat in the Central Eastern and South-eastern Atlantic could reflect relatively scarcer data and research on marine turtles and their trade in this region. Participants also reported concerns about legal take
contributing to illegal activities. This has been reported previously (CITES, 2019), but participants did not consider legal exploitation a great and urgent threat. This is probably a result of the limited extent of legal take and its lower rela- tive impact compared to threats such as bycatch and illegal take (Humber et al., 2014). The challenges identified by participants concerning il-
legal activities related simultaneously to fisheries manage- ment, enforcement and/or legislation matters (Fig. 5), em- phasizing the importance of multi-dimensional conservation
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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