Grant: 23-010E
Project Title: A Legal and Policy History of Sea Turtle Conservation in Florida
Project Manager: Stacey Gallagher
Organization: Sea Turtle Conservancy (Non-Profit Organization)
Grant Amount: $15,000.00
Completion Date:
Summary: Florida is home to more than 22 million people and more than 100 million people visit the state each year. At the same time, Florida’s coastal and in-water habitats are utilized by globally-important populations of sea turtles that are vulnerable to impacts from coastal lighting, degraded water quality, hard armoring structures, vessel strikes, and other anthropogenic threats. This dichotomy of high residential density and high sea turtle nesting density led to the need for government agencies to enact protection laws solely focused on sea turtles several decades ago. Many of these protection efforts took years of science-based advocacy, research, and education by individuals in the sea turtle community – many of whom are no longer here to tell the story of how the protection laws or policies were established. In a state that is growing and changing so rapidly, it is important to create a record of how conservation protections for sea turtles were achieved in the past to ensure that they are understood in their historical context and can be improved upon in the future. Through this project, Sea Turtle Conservancy (STC), with assistance from University of Florida Legal Skills Professor Emeritus Thomas Ankersen, will create a legal and policy history of sea turtle conservation in Florida. This policy history will be housed on an interactive website that will feature a timeline of key events that led to conservation successes for Florida’s sea turtles. In addition to using legal and historical research and archival photos to tell the story, oral history interviews will be conducted with key figures in the sea turtle conservation community who played important roles in establishing legal and policy wins for sea turtles and their habitats in order to capture their insight for future conservation leaders. 
Results: