UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Hoover, Aimee LynnSubject: search.filters.subject.Dispersal

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    LEATHERBACK TURTLE MOVEMENT AND DISPERSAL FROM NESTING BEACHES IN COSTA RICA WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT AND CONSERVATION
    (2017) Hoover, Aimee Lynn; Bailey, Helen; Secor, David H; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Electronic tagging permits movement and distribution studies of sea turtles as they traverse large distances through a dynamic ocean environment. However, little is known about the movements of early life stages at sea, a period termed the 'lost years'. I developed and tested a method for attaching an acoustic tag suitable for use on leatherback turtles that was then applied to hatchlings in Costa Rica to obtain measures of speed and directionality. This was compared with ocean currents and revealed that the hatchlings actively swam against nearshore currents, although they were still advected by them. Finally, a Poisson generalized linear model in a continuous-time Markov chain model framework was used to predict adult, post-nesting Eastern Pacific leatherback movement based on environmental drivers, such as sea surface temperature. Monthly, near real-time predictions of leatherback movement were estimated using the most recent satellite-derived environmental information to help inform conservation management strategies.