Hawksbills are among the most endangered sea turtles, listed as critically endangered by the iucn with an estimated 15,000 adult females remaining as of the most recent assessment

One of the top threats to their survival is the continued illegal trade in tortoiseshell products which still exists in dozens of countries. Two main impediments to stopping this trade are a lack of enforcement of existing laws and lack of awareness among consumers. In many hotspots, this trade is a low priority for law enforcement and government agencies or a technical expertise to identify these products is lacking. Tourists, primary consumers of these products in many places, are often unaware that they are purchasing an illegal wildlife product. See turtles, through our too rare to wear campaign, addresses this threat by studying the extent of this trade and providing tools and resources for travelers, government agencies, tour operators, and conservationists to identify tortoiseshell and stop the illegal trade. Over the next three years, too rare to wear proposes to lead a global campaign to address this trade to gather the most current data on the trade by updating our global tortoiseshell report and create ongoing monitoring in key spots upgrade our innovative see shell machine learning APP to make IT an indispensable tool for government officials, conservation professionals, travelers, and others to identify these products and collaborate with locally-based organizations working in the current hotspots for this trade to conduct outreach to key stakeholders including consumers, sellers, enforcement officials, and others to reduce both supply and demand for these products. These efforts will help to determine where efforts to stop this trade should be focused, build capacity for improved enforcement of laws prohibiting this trade, and reduce demand for these products by educating key consumers. We plan to deliver these objectives in collaboration with longstanding partners who are well established in wildlife trade data collection and analysis, including WWF, traffic, and arizona state university as well as locally based partners latin american sea turtles, fundacion tortugas DEL MAR, the leatherback project, and fauna and flora international - nicaragua. We will primarily focus on the two regions where there is strong evidence of the continuing trade, latin america and southeast asia. See turtles currently collaborates with more than 100 conservation organizations around the world on our various programs and we will TAP into that network to raise awareness of this issue and reach as many people as possible. We will also seek the support of law enforcement agencies, online marketplaces, and local communities in countries where on-the-ground activities will take place. Outreach activities in key hotspots will include capacity building of enforcement authorities, educational campaigns targeted at the primary consumers, and outreach to tortoiseshell sellers. See turtles has been a leader in addressing the international tortoiseshell trade since we launched the too rare to wear campaign in 2017. We have published two international reports page 59 of 107 on the trade, built an outreach coalition of more than 100 tour operators and conservation partners, reached millions of people, and have raised more than S100,000 for local campaigns to combat the trade. See shell is one of the first apps to use machine learning to address the illegal wildlife trade and thousands of government officials have been trained on its use.