course

The university course is an official so-called “project study" (“Projektpraktikum”) and is titled "Protection of Sea Turtles in Turkey: Project in Applied Nature Conservation" (course number 300222). It is being offered by the Department of Limnology and Bio-Oceanography, University of Vienna. This is a 6-credit course (10 ECTS points) in the university’s summer semester.

Conditions: Students are now required to register for this course in February via the university’s “Online-Anmeldesystem”. This system controls the student’s academic qualifications for the course. We can typically accept 20 students, and the online system ranks the students according to the number of points they allocate to the course. We normally have a waiting list and experience shows that 2-3 persons on that list have good chances of participating.

The course work is divided into three parts: training, fieldwork, report writing.

 

1. Seminar: The first part is a series of introductory lectures on sea turtles and on the specific methodologies that the students will be applying during the field work in Turkey. It also includes ca. 15-minute talks by each student on selected topics of sea turtle biology and conservation.

 

2. Fieldwork: The second part is a 5-week field work trip for each student in Turkey between July 1st and September 15th. Those students who are on site during the first half of the summer will see adult turtles, those who participate during the second half will only see hatchlings.

 

The students live in tents at camping sites near or adjoining of the nesting beach:
Calis: Tent area in a small eucalyptus copse at the beach promenade.

 

3. Report: The third and final part of the course involves producing a report on the data collected during the summer. Each student (or a team of two students) is responsible for a specific chapter reflecting the fieldwork period and the beach he or she worked on.

The reports of the last years can be found here!