Grant: 23-010E
Project Title: A Legal and Policy History of Sea Turtle Conservation in Florida
Project Manager: Stacey Gallagher
Organization: Sea Turtle Conservancy (Non-Profit Organization)
Grant Amount: $15,000.00
Completion Date: 2025-12-04
Summary: Florida is home to more than 22 million people and more than 100 million people visit the state each year. At the same time, Florida's coastal and in-water habitats are utilized by globally-important populations of sea turtles that are vulnerable to impacts from coastal lighting, degraded water quality, hard armoring structures, vessel strikes, and other anthropogenic threats. This dichotomy of high residential density and high sea turtle nesting density led to the need for government agencies to enact protection laws solely focused on sea turtles several decades ago. Many of these protection efforts took years of science-based advocacy, research, and education by individuals in the sea turtle community; many of whom are no longer here to tell the story of how the protection laws or policies were established. In a state that is growing and changing so rapidly, it is important to create a record of how conservation protections for sea turtles were achieved in the past to ensure that they are understood in their historical context and can be improved upon in the future. Through this project, Sea Turtle Conservancy (STC), with assistance from University of Florida Legal Skills Professor Emeritus Thomas Ankersen, will create a legal and policy history of sea turtle conservation in Florida. This policy history will be housed on an interactive website that will feature a timeline of key events that led to conservation successes for Florida's sea turtles. In addition to using legal and historical research and archival photos to tell the story, oral history interviews will be conducted with key figures in the sea turtle conservation community who played important roles in establishing legal and policy wins for sea turtles and their habitats in order to capture their insight for future conservation leaders. 
Results: During this reporting period, STC and Tom Ankersen, Esq., completed initial work on the Legal and Policy History of Sea Turtle Conservation project, which will serve as a living document that will be updated long after the conclusion of this STGP grant. During the process of completing the initial history research, conducting live interviews with key figures, writing the blog posts, summarizing them for the StoryMap, gathering supplemental materials, posting snippets of the blog posts on social media, editing interview videos, and guiding the creation of the StoryMap, it became clear that this project required much more time than was originally allotted during the initial grant period. From November 2023 to October 2025, STC and Tom Ankersen published six additional blog posts on STC's website, which included the final Early History blog post, three Lighting History blog posts, and two fisheries-related blog posts. To write these in-depth articles, Tom Ankersen and his interns utilized archived newspaper articles, scientific journals, books, and other media to research the specifics of each topic. STC also created a Collection titled "Preserving Conservation History." This Collection will feature compilation videos of each oral history interview conducted by STC, which will allow the stories of key individuals sea turtle conservation to be preserved for the future.