Turtle Rescue Forecast Challenge
Can you forecast the number of turtles rescued per site per week in Kenya?
Prize
Knowledge
Time
Active
Participants
24 active · 214 enrolled
Helping
Kenya
Intermediate
Forecast
Conservation
About

About Local Ocean’s sea turtle rescue program

Since 1998, Local Ocean Conservation (LOC) has been running a by catch net release program. By catch is when a non-target species, in this case endangered and critically endangered species of marine turtles, are captured in fishing gear accidently. They become tangled in nets and risk injury, drowning and even slaughter. What do we do about it? We work with around 350 local fishermen who, instead of slaughtering the turtles they catch or leaving them to die, contact us. We are then able to race to the rescue!

  • We assess the turtles condition, checking for parasites and injuries.
  • We collect data such as measurements, weight, species, gender etc.
  • We attach a tag or record the number of an existing tag.
  • We maintain a database of all recorded data.
  • We monitor the condition of turtles that have been recaptured, sometimes these are even ex-patients from our Rehabilitation Centre!

If the turtle is fit and healthy we transport them to a safe release site where they are returned to the ocean. If the turtle is sick or injured, we transport them back to our Rehabilitation Centre for medical treatment and provide specialist care until such time as they are strong enough to be released.

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We provide a small amount of remuneration to help participating fishermen to repair any damage to their gear and cover any other expenses incurred such as telephone and transport costs.

Each year the number of fishermen involved in this programme increases along with the number of turtles released, a reflection of the success of the linked education and community development programmes.

Since 1998 over 10,000 turtles have been released through this programme.

Each time a fisherperson catches a turtle they deliver the turtle to LOC researchers and get paid a small remuneration.

The objective of this challenge is to forecast the number of turtles caught per week per capture site. This will help Local Ocean plan their staff schedules and budget.

Files
Description
Files
Is the full list of variables found in the train.csv file and their explanations.
Is the dataset that you will use to train your model. This provides the detail of every sea turtle rescue.
Use this notebook to make your first submission.
Is the category of the capture site. Categories are defined by sites that are geographically near each other. Type is a masked characteristic of the capture site.
Is an example of what your submission file should look like. The order of the rows does not matter, but the IDs must all be present and correctly formatted. The IDs are formatted as "CaptureSite"_<CaptureSite ID number>_<year><week number>, e.g. CaptureSite_0_201901 is the capture site with ID number 0 in the first week of 2019 (1-6 January 2019).