Meeting Abstract
Beaches along the southeastern coast of the United States provide important nesting habitat for three species of sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, Caretta caretta, and Dermochelys coriacea. These nesting areas are increasingly threatened due to sea level rise, human shoreline development, and changing climate. Female sea turtles come on land to nest under a wide range of conditions with non-obvious, context-dependent environmental and historical cues dictating nest site preference. Though nesting occurs under a range of environmental conditions across latitudes, developing embryos are extremely sensitive to local climate and disturbance. We are modeling how climate during incubation as well as the location of a nest in relation to the high tide line, other nests, and human development impacts overall nest success. We are accomplishing this through using multiple decades of nest success and locality data from six National Parks that span the current latitudinal extent of United States Atlantic sea turtle nesting. Our results support that the number of eggs that successfully hatch and emerge from the nest is dependent on the temperature and precipitation during incubation as well as the presence of disturbances like nest flooding and depredation, with species level differences relating to physiological temperature tolerances and phenology. This work allows us to quantify the effectiveness of current management practices, like nest relocation and predator exclusion, while creating spatial forecasts for future nest success that take into account changes in sea level, climate, and storm surge flooding over the next century.
