Sea Turtle Migration Digital Management
A research-grade tracking platform for Indo-Pacific sea turtles, built with data sovereignty and FPIC community governance in mind.
What this platform is
An open research data infrastructure for Indo-Pacific sea turtle tracking — six species (green, hawksbill, leatherback, olive ridley, loggerhead, flatback) spanning the Coral Triangle, the South China Sea, and adjacent waters. Each tracked individual is published under a governance mode chosen by data-export rules, species-protection policy, and community consent.
Why governance is built in
Existing tracking platforms tend to publish coordinates openly or withhold them entirely. Neither serves the full research community well. This platform publishes everything — at the granularity each dataset can legally and ethically support. Cross-border coordinates are aggregated to ≈11 km grids. Species at sensitive sites (e.g. green turtles at Mirs Bay) are filtered per protection rule. Community-owned datasets are visible only under Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.
Who we work with
Built in collaboration with Hainan Normal University (field data contributor) and Chengdu Zhishen Technology (platform development). Reference datasets are drawn from public Indo-Pacific telemetry archives.
Status
This platform is in active development. Public endpoints follow Darwin Core conventions for occurrence data and offer Movebank-compatible exports for citation. Methods, schemas, and source code are documented in the repository.
We believe “open” and “governed” need not be a trade-off. How data can be shared while respecting sovereignty, ecology, and community consent sits at the core of our work — an interactive walk-through of that approach is here: Governance mechanism demo →