Trawling and Sea Turtle Capture Records: A Collaborative Effort between USGS and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
USGS is partnering with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to digitize 20 years of historic sea turtle relocation trawling reports from over 50 sites across nine states.
The Science Issue and Relevance: The U.S Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Operations and Dredging Endangered Species System (ODESS) is currently the central database for managing Protected Species Observer data associated with dredging and relocation trawling operations. Since its inception in 2017, ODESS has digitally entered recently collected data into the database. This project is digitizing hard copies of historic sea turtle relocation trawling reports from over 50 sites across nine states, spanning from as far north as Virginia on the U.S. Atlantic coast to Texas in the western Gulf of Mexico, and covering a 20-year period (1991 – 2011). The reports include over 15,000 scanned datasheets related to sea turtle captures during relocation trawling and over 17,500 datasheets for trawling operations. Once the data has been digitized it will be integrated into the ODESS database, so that researchers, managers, and other stakeholders will have valuable data that can be used to inform future risk-based dredging decisions and species management decisions in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
Methodology for Addressing the Issue: All hardcopies of datasheets will be digitized, then the data will be entered into a spreadsheet and brought into R, where it will be cleaned, changes will be scripted, and visualizations of trawling and turtle capture dataset contents will be created.
Future Steps: This project represents an example of the applied science that will provide actionable information for resource management and potentially policy decisions that restore, protect, and conserve wildlife of public concern, specifically imperiled sea turtles that are a Department of the Interior trust species and other imperiled marine species managed by the Department of Commerce. Additional data such as bycatch records that are important to resource managers currently exist only in hardcopy form. In the future, these could be put through this process as well and used to inform future management decisions.
USGS is partnering with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to digitize 20 years of historic sea turtle relocation trawling reports from over 50 sites across nine states.
The Science Issue and Relevance: The U.S Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Operations and Dredging Endangered Species System (ODESS) is currently the central database for managing Protected Species Observer data associated with dredging and relocation trawling operations. Since its inception in 2017, ODESS has digitally entered recently collected data into the database. This project is digitizing hard copies of historic sea turtle relocation trawling reports from over 50 sites across nine states, spanning from as far north as Virginia on the U.S. Atlantic coast to Texas in the western Gulf of Mexico, and covering a 20-year period (1991 – 2011). The reports include over 15,000 scanned datasheets related to sea turtle captures during relocation trawling and over 17,500 datasheets for trawling operations. Once the data has been digitized it will be integrated into the ODESS database, so that researchers, managers, and other stakeholders will have valuable data that can be used to inform future risk-based dredging decisions and species management decisions in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
Methodology for Addressing the Issue: All hardcopies of datasheets will be digitized, then the data will be entered into a spreadsheet and brought into R, where it will be cleaned, changes will be scripted, and visualizations of trawling and turtle capture dataset contents will be created.
Future Steps: This project represents an example of the applied science that will provide actionable information for resource management and potentially policy decisions that restore, protect, and conserve wildlife of public concern, specifically imperiled sea turtles that are a Department of the Interior trust species and other imperiled marine species managed by the Department of Commerce. Additional data such as bycatch records that are important to resource managers currently exist only in hardcopy form. In the future, these could be put through this process as well and used to inform future management decisions.