Data for quantifying the relative importance of survival threats to a long-lived reptile using expert elicitation

The data in this dataset were collected during a full-day workshop in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia on 6 November 2019 with experts from multiple states within the wood turtle range using a modified version of the Investigate Discuss Estimate Aggregate (IDEA) protocol. Most of the workshop was focused on eliciting demographic rates for wood turtles for constructing a matrix population model for the species. To identify the threats facing the survival of wood turtles, we conducted an additional expert elicitation specifically about the hypothesized causes of wood turtle mortality. We began by asking the experts to list all the significant sources of mortality they could think of for wood turtles. The experts were then asked to work together to form a consensus on the list of threats to the wood turtle population. We then asked each expert to independently provide their best estimate of the proportion of mortality that is attributed to each threat at each life stage (hatchling, juvenile, and adult), as well as the 95% confidence intervals around these estimates. For each life stage, total mortality across all threats plus an ‘other’ category must add up to 100%. The ‘other’ category was any mortality not attributed to one of the other listed threats.