The Turtle Research and Monitoring Database System (TREDS) training was held in Nadi last week.
The 3 days training was funded by the Western Pacific Regional Management Fishery Council which is based in Hawaii. The purpose of the workshop is to continue to support Pacific island countries and territories – especially Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and American Samoa – to manage their marine turtle data by training them in the use of TREDS. Fiji (Department of Fisheries, Mamanuca Environment Society and Wildlife Conservation Society) also attended the training.
TREDS is a system that has good data entry and reporting features and is user friendly.
Users can easily generate reports of national turtle populations and can relate these to the master database at SPREP. The quick reports help SPREP member countries to formulate informed conservation measures for the protection of marine turtles at both national and regional levels.
In the past years, concern for turtle conservation has grown in the region with an increasing number of initiatives being undertaken at local, national and regional levels. This has resulted in the establishment of SPREP’s Regional Marine Turtle Tagging Programme and an associated active network of government, community and NGO agencies working together for turtle conservation and recovery.
Marine turtles are a culturally important and shared resource of Pacific island peoples. The six species of turtles found in the region are all currently listed as either critically endangered, endangered or data deficient under the IUCN red list. The Society has been using this Database system for the last seven years and plays a major part in the UNDP Small Grant Programme Mamanuca Turtle Conservation Project . Data of unique encounters and field survey of nesting and foraging turtle, hatchling , injured turtles and also be entered into the database .
The TRED has recorded three hundred and thirty two (332) Hawkbills turtles in the Mamanuca waters.
Data collected from Titanium and Satellite tagged turtles show that Fiji including the Mamanuca region continue to serve as nesting and feeding for Fiji and migratory turtles from other Pacific countries.
