Abstract
The wide continental shelf and energy demand along the eastern coast of the United States makes this location desirable for marine energy testing and development, yet risks of ecological impacts on vulnerable marine wildlife raise stakeholder and regulatory concerns, potentially posing barriers. Five species of sea turtles inhabit the waters of the Northwest Atlantic, and all are considered globally vulnerable or endangered. These species play a critical role in maintaining a balanced marine ecosystem. There are a variety of conflicts that could arise with collocated marine energy infrastructure and sea turtle distributions, including entanglement and collision, noise and EMF pollution, and shifts in prey distribution. An understanding of sea turtle space use is crucial for assessing the extents of potential risks and limiting interactions between infrastructure and sea turtle activity. Species distribution and behavioral models, which incorporate survey and telemetry tag data to estimate turtle locations and critical habitat, are notoriously erroneous due to frequent sea turtle diving and low detection probability caused by limited tag data as result of high costs. Tagging rehabilitated turtles on land, rather than capturing them in open water, is an option to reduce the cost barrier of understanding distribution.
Here, we share preliminary results from research aimed at understanding the differences in behavior between wild-caught and rehabilitated turtles to determine the validity of the latter as a cost-effective method to determine sea turtle space use. We use wild caught and rehabilitated sea turtles' telemetry tag data in a variety of models to investigate differences in movement and distribution between the two groups. We anticipate results from this project will inform our understanding of sea turtle space use and improve distribution models that can advance planning for marine energy development.