In today's digital age, social media is a crucial tool for non-profit organizations and individual researchers to increase visibility, engage with audiences, and drive meaningful action. This workshop aims to empower participants with the skills and strategies needed to effectively utilize social media for advancing their missions.

Objectives:

1. Provide an understanding of various social media platforms and their unique benefits.

2. Equip participants with strategies to create engaging content tailored to their audience.

3. Teach best practices for increasing follower engagement and reach.

4. Share insights on measuring social media impact and adjusting strategies for optimal results.

5. Foster collaboration and idea exchange among participants.

Team BEACH (BE A CHangemaker) is an initiative started 0n 2020 by the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Program at Oceanic Society and Disney Conservation with the support of AZA-SAFE and USFWS that aims to encourage human behavior change campaigns and education programs that will result in successful conservation of sea turtles and their habitats. While many sea turtle conservation organizations implement outreach programs in their communities, not all of them are designed with tangible behavior change goals and evaluation plans. The goal of this workshop is to bridge the gap between sea turtle conservationists and behavior change theory and methodology to give them the necessary tools to make positive changes in their local communities where humans and turtles share space.

This workshop, the 14th in the series since 2010, is driven by the need to address the growing importance of sea turtle rescue centers in global conservation efforts. Over the past decade, these centers have expanded rapidly, often operating in emergency situations without access to specialized expertise, resulting in inefficiencies, resource strain, and—most critically—unnecessary suffering for animals.

The workshop aims to bring together professionals involved in sea turtle care and rehabilitation, providing an opportunity to exchange knowledge on diagnostic techniques, critical care, husbandry, injury management, anesthesia, and surgical procedures. Through this collaborative effort, we aim to establish standardized protocols and operational procedures to improve outcomes in sea turtle rehabilitation.

In considering the future direction of sea turtle rehabilitation, we must address the high costs associated with professional equipment, trained personnel, and advanced facilities. As funding for conservation initiatives is often limited, the future of rehabilitation should focus on enhancing cost-effectiveness through:

• Pooling Resources: Developing regional hubs and networks for equipment and expertise sharing.

• Training: Expanding training programs and meetings realized by experts for local veterinarians and technicians to improve their skills.

• Technology: developing standardized diagnostics procedures for common procedures.

• Collaboration: Strengthening international networks of rehabilitation centers for shared access to expertise and data.

We invite all participants to actively engage in this collaborative effort, contributing their expertise to help shape the future of sea turtle rehabilitation and conservation.

Incidental capture of sea turtles and other species of conservation priority in artisanal fisheries has negative impacts on these taxa and on fishers themselves. Thus, conservation strategies must balance reducing bycatch impacts on sea turtle populations with supporting the well-being of the small-scale fishing sector. Despite the fundamental importance of this challenge, many bycatch reduction initiatives often base their strategies primarily on scientific studies and experiments, focusing on species-specific gear modifications or bycatch reduction technologies, with little or no emphasis on the needs, challenges, and perceptions of fishers and the socio-economic conditions of their communities. In contrast, a truly holistic perspective recognizes that there are many possible activities–not just experiments–that can and should be implemented to reduce bycatch AND promote sustainable fisheries. However, the connections and influences between these activities, and how to effectively design and implement such holistic strategies, must be understood to achieve these ‘win-win’ goals.

The goal of this workshop is to identify, discuss, and encourage holistic initiatives that seek to promote long-term community well-being through strengthening sustainable fishing, which involves reducing negative impacts on marine ecosystems and their biodiversity. This workshop will roll out a newly developed ‘best practices’ manual that provides a clear roadmap for creating holistic solutions to address bycatch, and will feature a dynamic mix of expert presentations, sharing real-world experiences and lessons learned, alongside interactive discussion groups on successful collaborative strategies from across the globe. Participants will engage in activities fostering exchange with like-minded professionals, exploring best practices for designing and implementing comprehensive bycatch reduction strategies that build from the bottom-up, focusing on the human components. This workshop will promote visioning and initiatives that emerge from meaningful engagement with fishers and their communities, centering their interests, ideas, and needs.

For a long time there has been talk of the need for environmental education to become transversal and interdisciplinary, in order to create projects that are not only innovative, but also have a greater impact on the beneficiaries and the different institutions that work with sea turtles. The reality is that environmental education continues to be very isolated and often disconnected from research processes. This is why it is important to analyze the circumstances and actions of those educational projects that have managed to involve more than one turtle conservation stakeholder in order to replicate them, as well as any other tool or field of action that they have employed. Learning about other experiences will allow us to implement the most appropriate actions to achieve networking and increase the impact on sea turtle conservation. During the workshop, collaborative educational projects from around the world will be presented and we will seek to underpin the future actions of the nascent Sea Turtle Environmental Education Network (REATOMA), which will not only be the pillar of future educational actions, but will also become a turning point between researchers, conservationists and educators in view of much more transversal processes for the benefit of the communities and sea turtles. During the four previous workshops, different tools have been used to strengthen, create connections, diversify, evaluate and provide greater pedagogical capacities to the participants, so that the solidification of the network of educators is the necessary step to take the challenges of environmental education in these new times beyond the symposium space.

Much of what we know about the ecology and biology of sea turtles comes from studies on nesting females, and to a lesser extent, from juveniles in foraging and developmental habitats. These studies have primarily focused on understanding nest site fidelity, migratory movements, somatic growth rates, survival rates, and population structure. In comparison, little effort has been invested in understanding the ecology of male sea turtles, and even less in their management and conservation. Unlike females, males rarely come ashore, and the challenges involved in capturing them at sea have made it difficult to locate their feeding, courtship, and mating areas. Studying males in their foraging and mating areas across the globe is vital to better understand their habits, reproductive strategies, operational sex ratios, population dynamics, and habitat needs. After holding three previous workshops focused on male sea turtles, it is now time to continue promoting interest in including males in research and conservation efforts.

The main objective of this workshop is not only to review the status of global research and conservation efforts for male sea turtles but also to explore data collection methods that can address priority questions concerning male sea turtles.