Experts unveil new framework for improved conservation of marine
turtles 20 December 2010 | News story Effective conservation
often comes down to a matter of scale and strategy. For
threatened species that range across the globe, often the
biggest challenge to conservation is knowing how to prioritize
limited resources to the areas that need them most. In an
article published today in the journal Public Library of Science
ONE, the world’s leading marine turtle experts have developed a
new framework to address this challenge for highly migratory—and
highly threatened—marine turtles. The study’s authors, all part
of the IUCN’s SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group (MTSG),
compiled decades of research from thousands of sources over a
two-year process to create a novel system for defining
biologically independent population segments of marine turtle
species, which they termed Regional Management Units (or RMUs).
These RMUs represent functionally unique populations of the same
species toward which management and rese