Community‑powered conservation delivers major wins for Australia's freshwater turtles
The 1 Million Turtles community conservation program, led by Dr James Van Dyke, has become a powerful model for citizen‑driven environmental action, significantly improving freshwater turtle survival across south‑eastern Australia. What began as a research initiative has grown into a national movement, engaging communities, governments, and citizen scientists in hands‑on conservation.
TurtleSAT encourages citizens to become active participants in turtle conservation. The mobile app and web platform enable people to record turtle sightings, nests, mortalities, and predation, and now provide much of the national dataset used by state and federal agencies to determine conservation status and inform management decisions.
Since TurtleSAT’s launch in 2010, the community impacts have been substantial. By late 2025, volunteers had helped save more than 2,400 turtles, recorded over 1,700 nests, and contributed upwards of 31,000 freshwater turtle records.
A notable success from a partnership with 1 Million Turtles comes from Winton Wetlands, where floating “Turtle Islands” recorded a surge in hatchling success. Across January 2025, more than 200 critically endangered short‑necked turtles emerged from nests on the islands, with daily updates showing consistent hatching events throughout the month.
Education‑driven conservation also gained momentum. In March 2025, students from Presbyterian Ladies’ College Sydney successfully incubated and released eastern long‑necked turtle hatchlings as part of a school‑based conservation project supported by Western Sydney University and co‑led by 1 Million Turtles.
During 2025, Van Dyke and his team partnered with the Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board in South Australia through the TURTLE (Together Understanding and Recovering Turtles in our Landscapes and Ecosystems) project, an initiative aimed at engaging and recruiting communities along the lower Murray River- spanning at least from Murray Bridge to the Lower Lakes, and potentially extending from Renmark to the river's end - to actively support turtle conservation.
Central to this effort are meaningful collaborations with Traditional Owners throughout the region, reflecting a commitment to place-based, community-led approaches to recovering freshwater turtle populations across this area. During Turtle Month in October 2025, the Board amplified this work with a statewide call for the public to log sightings, nesting activity, and road mortality data through TurtleSAT, emphasising the urgency of gathering location-specific information to address regional declines and reinforcing the platform's role as a frontline conservation dataset guiding management and intervention planning.
The 1 Million Turtles program has also found fans at bars and bookstores - a children’s book, Mystery of the Missing Turtles, was published in 2025 to teach younger audiences about nest protection, and a fundraiser Drink Beer Save Turtle in partnership with the International Turtle Survival Alliance raised funding to support turtle conservation efforts in Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Published March 2026