Inspiration

Sea turtles demonstrate the ultimate lesson of ecology – that everything is connected.
Sea turtles are a part of two vital ecosystems: beaches and marine systems. If sea turtles become extinct, both the marine and beach ecosystems will weaken. And since humans use the ocean as an important source for food and beaches for many kinds of activities, weakness in these ecosystems would have harmful effects on humans.

Though sea turtles have been living and thriving in the world’s oceans for 150 million years, they are now in danger of extinction largely because of changes brought about by humans. If we alter the oceans and beaches enough to wipe out sea turtles, will those changes make it difficult for us to survive? And if we choose to do what’s necessary to save sea turtles, might we save our own future? (credit : www.bonaireturtles.org )

one of the threats for sea turtles is egg poaching, During the nesting season, hunters comb the beaches looking for nesting females at night . Often, they will wait until the female has deposited her eggs to kill her. Then, they take both the eggs and meat. unfortunately the number of egg poaching are increasing every year, in Sangalaki, a small Island in Indonesia, this case increased by 120% compared to 2013. a local intitute, Yayasan Penyu Laut Indonesia (YPLI) said that almost 1200 egg are stolen by poacher per month in Pasemut Island during a nesting season.

Sea turtles have played vital roles in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans for more than 150 million years. These roles range from maintaining productive coral reef ecosystems to transporting essential nutrients from the oceans to beaches and coastal dunes.this case successfully made our heart sink, so we hope this little tool we made can help out to ensuring sustainability of sea turtle's life. It is the right time for us to protect sea turtles and rebuild their populations to healthy levels as a vital step in ensuring healthy and resilient oceans for the future.

The Problem, and The Solution we offer

Egg Poaching is one of the major causes of Sea turtle Extinction. Since it happened a lot in Indonesia, then it become our responsibility to stop it. as a Computer Science student, we believe that by creating a Tool and a System that could Initialize and start a Crowd/community based movement to protect Turtle's egg from poaching can do a little help to prevent Sea Turtle from Extinction.

How it works

This Penyu Ranger (Sea Turtle Ranger) Project consist of the tool, and an android app. we called the tool as "Penyusuar" (inspired from Mercusuar, an Indonesian Language for Lighthouse) made of Raspberry pi, a proper web cam and PIR sensor. this tool was built to help Rangers (a name we gave to those who volunteered as turtle conserver) protect eggs from poacher, it can detect if there are threats around the nest of turtle's egg. we divided the threats into three conditions, condition one, if there's predator(animal) around the nest Penyusuar will play a dog-barking sound to drive away the predator. condition two, if there's human around the nest our tool will define them as a threat or non-threat, if they're considered as a non-threat our tool will only detect their faces and upload it to our dropbox. and condition three if Penyusuar define the human as a real threat, if they approaching the nest and stay there for a certain distance and amount of time our tool will upload their faces to dropbox (as suspect) and inform all rangers via SMS so rangers can make sure if there's a real threat and take care of it. The android app made to help rangers in order to manage the Penyusuar (located in each turtle nest) it will record the data of the Penyusuar installment including coordinate of the nest and Penyusuar location(automatically added), date of installment, number of eggs on the nest and the species of the turtle. this app will also give a reminder to the rangers on the 60th day since the installment that the egg is about to hatch, so Rangers can move the eggs to the conservatory and perform a semi-natural hatching. within our app rangers can manage Penyusuar record, show it in a Map, view uploaded photos, and also give rangers a statistical information about the number of threats per day shown on a chart.

Challenges we ran into

  • how to help Turtle Conserver against Egg Poaching
  • how to develop a system that can save turtle from extinction.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • We can work in pressure, and also in team
  • We can contribute to save turtle from extinction

What we learned

We learned that in order to save sea ecosystem, we cant miss a single part of it. Sea turtles have played vital roles in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans for more than 150 million years, but now they are in danger of extinction. We need to help them, that's what we need to in order to ensuring a healthy and resilient oceans for another million years.

What's next for Penyu Ranger

Our next dream is to Refine the design of the tools, collaborate with local conservatory organization and apply this solution in real-life.

+ 38 more
Share this project:

Updates