Nils' additional help with the turtle project

Nils started his internship with MCSS a few weeks ago.... Not the best period to be working on the Temporal Protected Areas Project for sea turtle conservation as there isn't any around at the moment since we are out of the nesting season for hawksbill turtle, nonetheless he has been involved on quite a few task, as he shares below........

Hello everyone! My name is Nils and currently I am involved with Vanessa’s TPA-Project in
the south of Mahé. As a part of my master’s programme I am volunteering with the MCSS.
Because the nesting season for Hawksbill turtles is already over for this time of the year I am
following different tasks than the daily monitoring of the beach. One of my main tasks for
the last two weeks was the maintenance of the Photo-ID-Database that the MCSS
established. I modified some features that makes the work easier to handle for the future
use.

database modification for Turtle ID

Additionally, to the land-based computer work I got involved to create a whole new in-water
seafloor assessment. The goal is it to characterize the main nesting beaches by their depth
and substrate on the seabed. By doing line-transects along the beach at certain distance we
collect our data. So far, we only carried it out on Anse Intendance to get an idea whether it
works the way we planned it. For future times we would like to extend this survey to other
nesting beaches.
The main reason for doing this is to get an idea of how the seafloor character and the depth
might influence the turtles to get out of the water at a certain point. Several publications
suggest that Hawksbill turtles and Green Sea turtles prefer different habitat characteristics.
Hopefully the transects will be successful and the data add up to the understanding of the
nesting turtles.

first pilot survey of the Intendance seafloor