OOS 51-2
Land use impacts on freshwater turtle populations: Insights from a national faculty/undergraduate student collaborative research project
Turtles inspire fascination and fondness in many people. Through the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), we took advantage of this inherent interest in turtles to introduce undergraduate students to vertebrate ecology while also determining how urbanization impacts turtle populations. An increase in urbanization is predicted to increase mortality rates of adult female turtles during nesting movements. If true, turtle populations should become more male-biased as urbanization increases. Faculty and students at over twenty-five institutions, mostly in the eastern United States, participated in the EREN pilot project TurtlePop with the dual goals of collecting data to test this hypothesis and providing a unique, collaborative, and authentic research opportunity for students. Participants conducted a mark-recapture study in 2012 and 2013 in one or more ponds using uniform protocols developed specifically for this project. Participants were trained either at EREN-sponsored workshops or via online training videos. Faculty members were also supplied with curriculum designed to use their own capture data to instruct students on turtle biology and basic population estimation methodology. Faculty members were also given protocols to conduct the GIS-based analysis of urbanization but for the research aspect, the project leader and his students performed all of spatial analyses.
Results/Conclusions
TurtlePop has been a rousing success as an educational platform for students. Faculty members have reported high levels of student engagement and enjoyment of the project. Students at several schools even developed their own offshoot projects as independent research. The research aspect of TurtlePop also appears successful. Preliminary analysis of 2012 data for the most common species, the painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), found the adult sex ratio was significantly biased towards adult males in 9 ponds and did not differ from parity in the remaining 7 ponds where at least ten adults were caught. Contrary to expectations, the proportion of adult female painted turtles increased with urbanization. We will continue to refine this analysis with additional data collected in 2013 with the immediate goal of submitting a peer-reviewing manuscript. TurtlePop participants made a two-year commitment to the project but several institutions only participated in 2012 due to initial failure to catch turtles or logistical difficulties. Other faculty, however, joined the project for the 2013 field season. Given the extremely positive response from students and the apparent value of expanding our dataset, we intend to continue and expand the project for as long as members are willing to participate.