GAL05 - Next-Gen Biometric, Conservation and Emergency Response for Marine Testudines

Marine testudines are keystone species for our oceans, yet they face extinction from habitat loss, poaching, and fisheries bycatch. In Sri Lanka, a globally significant nesting ground, conservationists still rely on fragmented, manual data and invasive physical tags that can cause animal distress and suffer from high loss rates.We are building TurtleGuard, an integrated digital ecosystem designed to revolutionize how we protect these ancient travelers. Our challenge focuses on three core pillars:Advanced Biometric Identity: Replacing invasive hardware with a high-accuracy, "digital fingerprinting" system that identifies individual turtles non-invasively, allowing for long-term tracking without physical contact.Central Life-History Registry: A cloud-synchronized database that connects individual identities with critical reproductive data and geospatial landmarks, providing a unified view of population dynamics across Sri Lanka's Southern coast.Automated Emergency Response: A real-time incident module that identifies "ecological hotspots" and dispatches immediate SOS alerts for stranding or bycatch events, aiming to reduce rescue response times by up to 70%.By bridging cutting-edge technology with marine biology, we are creating a scalable framework for modern conservation. We invite teammates to help us turn this vision into a functional tool that ensures no turtle is left behind.

Over the 48-hour hackathon, we aim to build a working prototype of a digital system that makes sea turtle conservation faster and safer on a global scale. The heart of our project is an AI identification tool that can recognize individual turtles just by looking at a photo, which means we don't have to use physical tags that might hurt them. We will connect this to a secure digital database where we can store important records like how many eggs a specific turtle has laid or where she usually nests.

While our system is designed for global use, we will demonstrate its power using real field data from the Southern Province. To make this data useful in the real world, we are creating a Live Map and SOS Alert system. This will show exactly where turtles are nesting or where they might be in danger along the coast. If someone finds an injured turtle, the system sends an immediate alert to the right people with the exact location. Our goal is to show a complete journey—from identifying a turtle to protecting it in real-time—that can eventually be used by conservationists all over the world.

AI/ML Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Geomatics Engineer, Data Scientist