Estimation of the Maternal Investment of Sea Turtles by Automatic Identification of Nesting Behavior and Number of Eggs Laid from a Tri-Axial Accelerometer.

Monitoring reproductive outputs of sea turtles is difficult, as it requires a large number of observers patrolling extended beaches every night throughout the breeding season with the risk of missing nesting individuals. We introduce the first automatic method to remotely record the reproductive outputs of green turtles () using accelerometers. First, we trained a fully convolutional neural network, the V-net, to automatically identify the six behaviors shown during nesting.