The Box Turtle Ecology Creative Inquiry focuses on understanding turtle behavior across various habitat types and explores a novel method for tracking turtle movements in urban neighborhoods.
Supervised by Dr. Kyle Barrett and led by master’s student Hannah Meredith, this CI gives undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in real-world research that bridges ecology, technology, and community engagement.
Currently, our students are tracking a group of turtles that are distributed across a gradient of development from the Clemson University Forest to neighborhoods in downtown Clemson. When they relocate these turtles, they conduct experiments to see how “bold” the turtle is, allowing them to test the hypothesis that turtles found in neighborhoods are often the ones most willing to explore environments different from their natural habitats.
The new idea for turtle tracking involves attaching a small QR code to the turtle’s shell in hopes that when someone finds the turtle, they will scan it and complete a brief survey that provides information on where the turtle was located and what it was doing. This helps them learn about turtle biology and offers a fun way for the public to discover more about turtles.
