Migratory Connectivity and the Conservation of Migratory Animals
Migration is the repeated seasonal movement to and from a breeding area. The linking of individuals or populations of a given species within its range, including its breeding, migration, and wintering areas, is known as migratory connectivity. In this Article, we discuss how new technologies and approaches are enhancing our knowledge of migratory connectivity, which in turn can improve our legal and policy approaches to the conservation of migratory animals. Advances in studying and documenting migratory connectivity require new approaches to the design and implementation of both domestic and international conservation efforts. Understanding migratory connectivity of different populations of species between specific geographic locations can also help build “social connectivity” for conservation—the cultural, educational, economic, and institutional linkages between these same locations that are a necessary foundation for effective and sustainable conservation efforts.
Origins of juvenile green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the Bahamas: A comparison of recent and historical rookery contributions
Abstract Conservation of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) benefits from knowledge of population connectivity across life stages. Green turtles are managed at the level of genetically discrete rookeries, yet individuals from different rookeries mix at foraging grounds; therefore, rookeries may be impacted by processes at foraging grounds. Bimini, Bahamas, hosts an important foraging assemblage, but rookery contributions to this assemblage have never been resolved. We generated mitochondrial DNA sequences for 96 foraging green turtles from Bimini and used Mixed Stock Analysis to determine rookery contributions to this population using 817 and 490 base pair (bp) rookery baseline data. The MSA conducted with 817 bp data indicated that Quintana Roo, Mexico, and Central Eastern Florida contributed most to the Bimini population. The MSA conducted with 490 bp data indicated that Southwest Cuba and Central Eastern Florida contributed the most to Bimini. The results of the second MSA differ from a previous study undertaken with 490 bp data, conducted in Great Inagua, Bahamas, which suggested that Tortuguero, Costa Rica, contributed the most to that foraging assemblage. Large credible intervals in our results do not permit explicit interpretation of individual rookery contributions, but our results do indicate substantial relative differences in rookery contributions to two Bahamian foraging assemblages which may be driven by oceanic currents, rookery sizes, and possibly juvenile natal homing. Our findings may implicate a shift in contributions to the Bahamas over two decades, highlighting the importance of regularly monitoring rookery contributions and resolving regional recruitment patterns to inform conservation.
Ocean predictive skill assessments in the South Atlantic: Crowd-sourcing of student-based discovery
Autonomous Underwater Gliders have over a decade long history of successful regional deployments serving scientific, societal and security needs in application areas ranging from pole to pole and including the full range of water depths from shallow coastal seas to the deep ocean. Glider deployments covering the basin scale are much fewer, but are a growing capacity as demonstrated by the Woods Hole to Bermuda line that crosses the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic Crossing line that follows the Gulf Stream, and the basin circling flights now being conducted as part of the Challenger Glider Mission. The next step in the evolution of the global Challenger mission is to enable an ensemble of modelers from different institutions and agencies to participate in a meaningful way. This process with be formalized in 2014 by leveraging the data management tools of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the education tools of the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Ocean Observing Initiative (OOI). The Education Visualization (EV) tools developed by the OOI's Education and Public Engagement (EPE) Implementing Organization (IO) are currently being configured through the cyber OOI net to display real time OOI glider data with intuitive interactive browser-based tools, reducing the barriers for student participation in sea exploration and discovery. Through U.S. IOOS, forecast ocean data will be harvested from the ephemeral ocean snapshots produced by an ensemble of ocean models along the same glider tracks as Challenger. The parallel observed and forecast datasets, both evolving in real time, will be accessible through the same OOI EV tools, enabling student participation in a crowd-sourced ocean predictive skill experiment. The result will satisfy one of the important goals of the Challenger mission by enabling students to assess of the quality of the ensemble of available global scale ocean models. Student research team projects that use the new model data comparison capabilities will be conducted during the summer of 2014. Students will compare an ensemble of the global ocean models along the high velocity transport pathways by gliders on basin-scale missions, such as one that traverses the northern side of the South Atlantic gyre along the Brazilian shelfbreak. The lasting impact of the Challenger mission will be a global fleet available to respond to events, an assessment of the ocean models along the fastest ocean transport pathways, and the establishment of a network of gliderports for global response.