SEE Shell

About SEE Shell

SEE Shell crowdsources photo reports of turtleshell products to track the trade of Hawksbill sea turtle shells. It is a tool designed to quickly and accurately determine, through machine learning, if a product for sale is turtleshell or a faux or similar object.

SEE Shell was developed as part of the Too Rare To Wear campaign, a project of SEE Turtles, a sea turtle conservation non-profit. This app was built by a partnership of SEE Turtles, in collaboration with members of the Smithsonian Institution Data Science Lab and Conservation Biology Institute and Valtech. SEE Turtles partners who have helped develop this tool include the Turtle Foundation, Yayasan Penyu Indonesia, Fundacion Tortugas del Mar (Colombia), Latin American Sea Turtles (Costa Rica), and Fauna & Flora International (Nicaragua).