Ms Agnese Mancini
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Agnese Mancini, Turtlewatch Egypt,
21 Rue de la Fontaine du Saoult, Antony France
Skype etc:sgnese100779 (skype), 00447521088319 (whatsapp)
email: agnese@boomerang4conservation.org
*-Main email: agnese@booomerang4conservation.org
www.boomerang4conservation.org
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GIS WORK: https://samplegiswork.wordpress.com/https://samplegiswork.wordpress.com/
*-ORGANIZATION’S WORK: Boomerang For Earth Conservation is a small NGO that I co-founded in 2010. The scope of the organization was to run community-based conservation and education projects in the hope that the projects would then be ‘adopted’ locally by either local NGOs or the community. Most of our work occurred in Mexico and Egypt and was related to marine turtles. In the last few years, we focused on environmental education, including citizen science projects, especially in the Egyptian Red Sea where we collaborated with a local NGO to gather data on abundance and distribution of endangered marine turtles.
I am a co-founder and have been the NGO managing director since its inception. Since 2015 I am also the President of the NGO. My role essentially is to design field-based projects, identify partners on the ground and find financial support.
I have led and organized a variety of courses and trainings on marine resources targeting rangers, students and the public, especially in Egypt where I worked towards a standardized methodology to collect data on marine turtles. I have also led a few research projects in various countries, my idea is that you lead by doing and showing things in a hands-on manner, you brainstorm frequently with your team and you encourage people in pursuing their own ideas.
I have started working in the field of marine conservation in 2004, while working on my master project in the Mediterranean Sea. My focus has always been on marine conservation, although recently I have been working on terrestrial conservation projects as well. Specifically I worked/work at the edge of social and ecological science looking for most sustainable ways to use natural resources while improving local livelihoods. I have used GIS techniques to map distribution and abundance of marine resources, but also human impact and use (i.e. maps of fishing grounds as a proxy to establish where stranded animals were coming from). In recent years, I looked into spatial planning and zoning, information used to implement management plans of protected areas.
The Egyptian Red Sea coast is largely understudied, most monitoring events and studies are punctual and directly dependent on international grants and specialists coming periodically into the country. The Red Sea is a key site for conservation, especially in the context of climate change and coral bleaching. Corals in the Red Sea are known to be more resilient than others, nevertheless very little is known about them and something as simple as a map of coral refugia in the area is missing. Park rangers and students in marine science are not trained in GIS but usually learn the basics in a hands-on manner.
*-Current GIS expertise: I was a SCGIS scholar in 2006 and learnt through that scholarship how to use ArcGIS 9.2 for basic and advanced spatial analysis. Since then, I have used the trial version of AcGIS 10 and some of its extensions including the Tracking analyst extension to track movements of collared elephants in Sabah, Borneo and Spatial analyst to study abundance and distribution of marine turtles in Egypt. I am familiar with other GIS software that I used for studying the evolution of human encroachment in a wildlife management area in Tanzania and I am currently learning how to do spatial analysis in R using the various available packages Apart from the SCGIS scholarship and some scattered class while in University most of my GIS learning comes from online courses, or just playing with the software and searching the internet for methods and explanations. I took a course on Coursera on ‘Maps and the geospatial revolution’ from the Pennsylvania State University where I learnt how to use ArcGIS online
I would be interested in learning two things mostly:
- How to teach basic GIS skills to park rangers and students in Egypt, where I would like to open a local SCGIS chapter, and
- How to use online GIS softwares (apart from ArcGIS Online) to communicate results from our projects using well-designed and catchy maps.
What I would like to do with this scholarship is to set up a local SCGIS chapter in Egypt and organize regular GIS trainings for park rangers and students from local universities. Then I also would like to set up a special training event for dive guides, equip them with water-proof GPS and enroll them in the mapping of important areas for marine resources (coral refugia, marine mammal resting and feeding areas, turtles feeding and nesting grounds, important areas for sharks, seagrass areas, mangrove areas, etc). I think that with a diversified team trained in GIS techniques, conservation and natural resource preservation planning would improve substantially.
2018 Conference Presentation:
Presentation -pdf
Video -mp4 HD
2018 Paper Title & Abstract: TurtleWatch Egypt – Can citizen science help us identify important areas for turtles?
Five species of marine turtles are known to inhabit the Egyptian Red Sea, endangered green and critically endangered hawksbill turtles being the most commonly observed species. Nevertheless information on important aggregations sites, population structure and population abundance are still quite scarce. An intensive scientific monitoring has been conducted between 2010 and 2013 but such an effort had to be limited in time (3 years) and space (Southern Egyptian Red Sea), due to the limited human and financial capital available. The Egyptian Red Sea coast extends for more than 1,000 km (including the Suez Canal and the South Sinai peninsula) and includes various off-shore islands. Therefore an extensive scientific monitoring program would require considerable funds and a relatively big team, making such an event practically impossible on the long run. For this reason, between 2011 and 2013 we tested a citizen science based monitoring program, called TurtleWatch Egypt that was aimed at collecting information on marine turtles in their feeding grounds. Dive centres were approached through the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), an Egyptian NGO created 20 years ago by dive centres. During the study period 2,448 surveys were completed at 157 sites and a total of 1038 sightings of turtles were reported. Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) and green (Chelonia mydas) turtles made up to 68% and 28% respectively of the total number of sightings; however rare species like loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and olive ridleys (Lepidochelys olivacea) were also detected (less than 1% of total sightings respectively). Some of the monitored sites were classified as important for turtles, due to the high probability to spot at least one individual; while in other sites no turtles were observed over multiple monitoring occasions. Most participants reported adult sized turtles, although many size classes were observed (range of straight carapace length SCL for green turtles: 30-150 cm, range of SCL for hawksbill turtles: 30-100 cm). 34% of the observed turtles were classified as adult males, providing important input on the distribution of males during nesting and non-nesting seasons. Furthermore, behaviours like mating and courtship were reported from sites where these activities hadn't been previously detected. Results from this initiative provided important new knowledge of marine turtles in the Red Sea, especially from largely understudied feeding grounds. This shows the great potential for using citizen science monitoring programs to collect basic information on endangered species in the Red Sea thanks to the presence of large numbers of safari boats and dive centers going at sea daily.