Part 1. Introduction

There are currently six species of marine turtle recognised in Australia, all of which are on the lists of threatened species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). As a consequence of these listings, a recovery plan must be prepared that identifies the objectives, criteria and actions for the recovery of each species.

Data sets identifying long-term trends in marine turtle populations are few. Much of the biological information in this plan has been generated by the Queensland Environment Protection Agency’s Queensland Turtle Research Project and to a lesser extent the Western Australian Marine Turtle Project and data from the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory.

There is no doubt that a range of impacts potentially threatens marine turtles across their distribution. However, because of a scarcity of long-term data, the impact at the species and population level of many of these potential threats is difficult to determine. This plan aims to reduce known threats, rather than focusing on the recovery of populations, and should reduce the mortality from human induced sources and thus improve the long-term chances for recovery in the wild.

The management of marine turtles is difficult because of their complex ecology. The size and status of these populations is difficult to quantify because:

 most of their lives are spent in the marine environment;
 hatchlings disperse throughout entire oceans;
 individuals follow their own migratory path;
 they are highly migratory, crossing Commonwealth, State, Northern Territory and international boundaries;
 only the females return to their natal beach, where they lay several clutches of eggs, and not all females nest each year;
 they are long-lived and slow to mature;
 they occupy different habitats at different stages of their life; and
 they are subject to a wide range of impacts at different stages of their life.

Limpus and Reimer (1994) identified a 50–80 per cent decline in nesting loggerhead turtles in Queensland between the mid 1970s and 1990. The Recovery Team identified this decline as an issue of importance prompting the following guiding statement.