As turtle populations decline worldwide, increased protections (e.g. United States Endangered Species Act) yield increased regulatory burdens. As a consequence, monitoring of imperiled turtle species is imperative to understand both their extant distributions, but also to ensure regulatory compliance.

However, conventional methods for surveying turtles are frequently costly, time consuming, require taxonomic expertise, and unlikely to yield detections without repeated visits. And these burdens are exacerbated when sampling rare, threatened, or endangered (RTE) species. In these instances, innovative technological advances may overcome these limitations, ultimately streamlining monitoring.