Tracking Turtles

After several years of planning and anticipation, the TfW team made its way to Odisha, in March 2023 to study olive ridley turtles from a different perspective.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of olive ridley turtles nest on the beaches of Odisha and return to the sea. They aggregate in nearshore waters adjacent to their mass nesting sites. Estimation of their densities has traditionally been carried out using manual survey techniques using boat transects.

In this project, we tested the use of UAVs as an alternative to conduct these assessments in a safe, time-efficient way without causing disturbance to the turtles.

This initiative was a collaborative effort between WWF-India, Dakshin Foundation, and the Technology for Wildlife Foundation (TfW), with the goal of studying the near-shore aggregations of these turtles.