BIO

My name is Natalie Tosto and I am a sophomore here at Florida State University. I enjoyed conducting research this year with Dr. Cullen, but in the future I am hoping to pursue environmental law.

Seasonal and latitudinal comparisons of space use by juvenile green turtles (Chelonia mydas) from the Northwest Atlantic 

Abstract

Understanding the movement patterns of animals is important to making inference on their resource use and may inform conservation efforts to protect vital habitats. Space use by marine organisms is often driven by environmental conditions, typically as a result of seasonal patterns or latitudinal gradients. Green turtles exhibit a circumglobal tropical distribution and are expected to vary their space use with respect to the abundance and distribution of resources. Although space use has been previously estimated for green turtles at many different locations, methods used to do so likely resulted in overestimates due to the violation of temporal autocorrelation from the tracked turtles. Additionally, it remains unclear whether there are any effects of latitude (possibly as a result of temperature, species richness, biodiversity) on green turtle space use. The goal of this research is to understand the spatial ecology of juvenile green turtles with respect to environmental gradients over space (latitude) and time (seasons). I hypothesize that space use will be much smaller in the warmer seasons as well as in the tropical region (Bimini) than in Crystal River. Satellite tags were deployed on five juvenile green turtles in Crystal River, FL and eight juvenile green turtles in Bimini, Bahamas and error was accounted for using RStudio. To estimate the space use I will be using a dynamic Brownian Bridge Movement Model (dBBMM) which accounts for temporal autocorrelation and changes in behavior.

Keywords: green turtles, latitude, space use