2018 Regional Reports Now Available

Today we are excited to publish the first round of Regional Reports (2018) representing five of the MTSG’s ten global regions. You can download the reports here.

In 2017 the IUCN-SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group launched a new regional reporting initiative that aims to harness the collective power of our global expert members to compile and summarize the most relevant data for conservation of sea turtles in each of the 10 MTSG regions and their respective marine turtle Regional Management Units (RMUs). Through this initiative, the MTSG aims to publish annual Regional Reports that summarize all known published data and pertinent unpublished data (at the authors’ discretion) for each country and region in which sea turtles occur.

Our hope is that the information in these Regional Reports will become a valuable reference for conservationists worldwide, and moreover will facilitate the production of future Red List assessments, a process that heretofore has been painstaking. In short, the Regional Reports are intended to: 1) help the MTSG fulfill its role as the global authority on sea turtles, and 2) spread the labor of Red List assessments to a broader force of MTSG members.

We are grateful to the dozens of MTSG members and regional vice chairs who contributed to this initiative in its inaugural year and look forward to adding more regions and more countries in the year(s) ahead.