The Pacific-Atlantic Sea Turtle Assessment Project (PASTA): Bringing Disciplines Together to Evaluate the Causes of Sea Turtle Decline

Project Concepts Our project is unique in our effort to combine the ideas and draw upon the expertise of scientists from a number of different disciplines: sea turtle biology and physiology, population dynamics, fisheries science, and oceanography. Our project has already generated multiple new theories regarding the causes of sea turtle declines and the role of pelagic fisheries in those declines. It has also promoted research partnerships that reach far beyond the typical approaches used to assess populations of threatened species. Our comparative approach has generated a set of working hypotheses that we can evaluate both with existing data and with data we can reasonably expect to obtain in the near future. We have also identified critical gaps in existing research that must be addressed by management agencies to further clarify the causes of and identify the preventions needed for the reversal of sea turtle population decline.