Sea turtle climate change biologists should do more measuring and less modeling

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change poses many threats to threatened and endangered species, including sea turtles. These threats include the erosion of nesting beach habitat, altered sex ratios of hatchlings, and latitudinal shifts in preferred nesting conditions as temperatures warm globally. Researchers and conservation practitioners often model the potential consequences of climate change to help guide management practices, but greater focus should be placed on measuring the responses of species to climate change through long-term field studies. Here, we review studies undertaken to assess, simulate, or project the impacts of climate change on sea turtles. We placed 53 recently published (2003–2015) studies into one of three categories (Historical Assessment Only, Current Conditions and Projections, Historical Assessment and Projections). The first and most common category (58% of surveyed publications) includes short-term studies of current environmental needs and models of future climate changes to determine if those conditions will be met in the future. The second category (32%) includes studies of historical responses of sea turtles to climate change derived from long-term (>10 year) datasets, without projections into the future. The least common approach (9%) included studies that used both long-term datasets on species’ responses to observed climate change and quantitative models of future climate scenarios. We synthesize the relevant literature on this topic and argue for new studies that integrate long-term historical datasets for species responses to climate change, rather than models extrapolated from current conditions.