Catch up: webinar recording about turtles in South East SA & SW Victoria

Back in November, I joined turtle expert Mike Thompson in an online webinar to discuss freshwater turtles in south-eastern Australia. Freshwater turtle populations have declined by up to 90% in some areas of Australia, and – despite many of us having sightings in our travels – there is little in the way of formally recorded population data from much of south-eastern Australia. Mike’s project, 1 Million Turtles, supports turtle conservation initiatives and the related app, TurtleSAT, allows anyone to record sightings of turtles to help build up the picture of their current population.

In the first part of the webinar, Mike told us all about the freshwater turtle species of our region, the reasons for their decline and why it matters. Even though I’ve been practicing ecology in this region for more than 20 years, I learned a lot! I followed up Mike’s talk with a quick overview of some of our wetland restoration sites which also provide recovering turtle habitat.

Turtles are most active during spring and summer. If you do see any when you’re out and about, take some clear pictures, and log your sightings on TurtleSAT (records of both live and dead turtles are valuable, plus nests, both intact or destroyed). 1 Million Turtles is also looking for volunteers to take part in a nest predation experiment to test predation levels at river and wetland sites around Australia; so please get in touch if you’d like to be connected up!

The webinar recording can be found below for those who were unable to join us on the night. To those who did join us thanks for your participation – perhaps you would like to listen again or pass this on to others you think would be interested in this community conservation program?