Diamondback Terrapins
Volunteer to Help Protect Diamondback Terrapins
Join our 2026 Diamondback Terrapin conservation efforts and help monitor one of Long Island’s most iconic species.
Whether you’d like to get outside and survey local shorelines or contribute from home, there are two ways to participate. Both volunteer opportunities support Seatuck’s Diamondback Terrapin conservation work and help researchers better understand and protect local populations.
Choose How to Participate
Option 1: Volunteer Headcount Surveys (In the Field)
Help collect standardized scientific data by conducting brief visual surveys at designated shoreline locations across Long Island.
This coordinated regional effort brings together volunteers from across the Northeast to monitor terrapin populations using a standardized survey method. The information collected will help researchers and wildlife managers track population trends over time and inform future conservation and management decisions.
Perfect for: Volunteers who enjoy spending time outdoors and visiting local marshes and shorelines.
Option 2: Help Analyze Drone Footage (From Home)
Prefer to volunteer from home? You can help identify terrapins by reviewing short drone videos of Long Island marshes through Zooniverse. Simply watch brief video clips and mark any terrapins you see. No special equipment, field experience, or prior knowledge is required.
Your observations help researchers process large amounts of drone imagery and better understand terrapin populations across Long Island.
Perfect for: Anyone who prefers a flexible volunteer opportunity.
Volunteer Headcount Surveys
What Volunteers Do
Participants conduct simple, land-based visual surveys from designated shoreline locations. Surveys involve three slow visual sweeps of the water from a single observation point, recording the number of terrapins observed, along with basic weather and site conditions.
Each survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete and can be done independently.
Survey Season
Volunteers are asked to survey throughout the season:
- May 1 – June 30: Three surveys per site
- July 1 – August 31: One survey per site
- September 1 – October 31: One survey per site
Volunteer Training
Before participating, volunteers should review the official survey protocol and attend a training session if possible. Training will cover:
- Terrapin identification
- Survey techniques
- Datasheet completion
- Safety guidance
- Equipment recommendations
Upcoming Training Dates
- August 5, 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at Suffolk County Environmental Center – Register here
A pre-recorded training will be available soon.
Get Started
Please review the materials below before heading into the field:
Analyze Drone Footage from Home
What Volunteers Do
Help researchers identify Diamondback Terrapins by reviewing aerial footage collected from Long Island’s South Shore marshes.
Using the Zooniverse platform, you’ll watch short video clips and mark any terrapins you see. Your observations help researchers process thousands of images that would otherwise take much longer to analyze.
No experience or special equipment is needed, and you can participate whenever your schedule allows.
Get Started
Visit our Zooniverse project to begin classifying drone footage.
This project is funded by the New York State Department of State under Title 11 of the Environmental Protection Fund.
About Diamondback Terrapins
One of Long Island’s more iconic coastal species is the Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin), the only turtle in the world that inhabits brackish water habitats such as salt marshes, tidal creeks, and shallow bays and harbors. Individual terrapins can be seen with their heads bobbing at the water surface, basking in the sun on mud banks, and, most excitedly, occasionally encountered when a female comes ashore seeking a nesting site to lay her eggs. On Long Island, historically, terrapin populations faced a number of threats including direct human harvest for food, and destruction of coastal nest-laying habitat (take a look at an aerial photograph of southern Nassau County and/or southwestern Suffolk County and the widespread destruction and alteration of habitats is plainly evident). Fortunately, collecting terrapins for food has been made illegal but they still face a myriad of other threats that jeopardize their long-term survival here such as motor vehicle and boat collisions. To address these threats and address other basic aspects of terrapin ecology, Seatuck and a coalition of governmental entities, other nonprofit organizations and academic institutions have formed the Long Island Diamondback Terrapin Working Group, which first met in 2018. Seatuck and our partners are seeking volunteer citizen scientists to join “Terrapin Watch,” which seeks to identify important Diamondback Terrapin habitat across Long Island, as well as potentially dangerous road crossings.
Join Terrapin Watch
In June 2020, the Peconic Estuary Partnership co-hosted the Long Island Diamondback Terrapin Monitoring Workshop with Seatuck and Dr. Russell Burke of the Jamaica Bay Project which covered topics regarding natural history, biology, and how to survey for diamondback terrapins. You can view the recorded Zoom presentation here.
Join the growing number of citizen scientists from around Long Island in monitoring the occurrences of Diamondback Terrapins in our region. The information from Terrapin Watch helps ascertain important nesting and foraging sites and identify hazardous road crossings. It also helps guide efforts to safeguard this iconic Long Island species.
