Help us find the Sea Turtles!

Dronde Están las Tortugas? We are DELT, a non-profit project dedicated to supporting grassroots efforts in the protection of wildlife around the world. Our team, consisting of AI engineers and drone nerds, has created a technology that can send out drones to locate and identify nesting sea turtles so that rescue teams can more easily find and retrieve them. Our mission: We want to provide a sustainable solution to aid in sea turtle search and rescue operations.

The Problem: DELT was created after visiting a sea turtle and ocean conservation project called Vivemar based in Oaxaca, Mexico in January 2022. There we learned about how organizations like this rescue sea turtles to protect them and their eggs from poachers and other threats. In order to find the sea turtles before harm befalls them, conservation groups have to patrol long stretches of beach, both day and night, an impressive but resource draining operation. Currently this is done by sending volunteers out on ATVS or off-road vehicles to look for tracks and find turtles that have come ashore. Although these operations are very effective, they use a lot of man-power and resources to function.

The Solution: We saw an opportunity to apply our team's combined experience in data science, machine learning, and drone detection to streamline the search and rescue process. DELT was created because we believe that animal conservation efforts deserve to benefit from cutting-edge technology as much as humans and industries do. We have been perfecting our AI model over the past year, working with Vivemar as well as two sea turtle conservation scientists based in Costa Rica and Barcelona. Our model can already detect sea turtles with up to 98% accuracy* both during the day and at night, which is very important since sea turtles often nest at night. We are ready to take our model out into the field and have been invited by Vivemar to come back to Oaxaca to deploy the technology and help them find some turtles!

What We Need: We are going back to Oaxaca at the end of the year to collect more data and deploy our drones to help find sea turtles. We have acquired through some generous sponsors two drones that can fly during the day, but because many (if not most) sea turtles come to shore at night to nest, we need a night vision drone (Autel Robotics EVO II Dual 640T) to search for them. This is an integral part of our technology, not only allowing us to capture more data but help find more sea-turtles, especially in the upcoming nesting season in Oaxaca.

Please help us find the turtles! Your support could go a long way in helping not just one sea turtle conservation project, but many, all around the world!

* Our model's accuracy depends on the dataset that we are using for our tests and ranges from 55% - 98%. Our results and accuracy percentage will stabilize the more we are able to test in real-time, out in the field.