Friends of Kingston Inner Harbour, Tracking and Talking About Turtles Project

This year, the Community Foundation’s support for the Friends of Kingston Inner Harbour enabled the Friends to dramatically improve the quality of their citizen-science project.  Instead of 4 community events educating the public about turtles, they organized 15 events that included hands-on experience with turtles, snakes, turtle artifacts and handouts with turtle ID.

Through these events they engaged close to 1,000 participants who learned about turtles and the importance of conserving turtle habitat.  In addition, with the real advantage of hiring two student consultants for 12 weeks, volunteer coordination, data management and media outreach became more streamlined.

This season, once again about 50 energetic volunteer citizen-scientists helped protect over 100 turtle nests from predation with nests GPS located and mapped.  Increased monitoring time resulted in:

a) improved climate measurements with newly purchased air and water temperature gauges,

b) better distinctions made for volunteer citizen-scientists between real and suspect nests,

c) improved media outreach via radio, TV, Facebook and newsprint,

d) more complex and informative GPS location and mapping,

e) effective use of analytics to determine success of media outreach.

In addition to funding from CFKA, the group also received grants from World Wildlife Canada, Trailhhead and Freshwater Future.

Next year the plan is to further work on winter hibernacula studies, track a few turtles for an entire year using telemtry and also to snorkel with the turtles to try and determine their range.

Mary Farrar, Friends of Kingston Inner Harbour