Using accelerometers for tracking loggerhead and green sea turtle behaviour.

Background: Understanding animal behaviour is critical for the design of effective conservation and management strategies. Animal-borne tri-axial accelerometers constitute a type of biologging device which have the potential to provide continuous high-resolution behavioural data. For marine animals, device attachment position may influence both the accuracy of behavioural predictions and the hydrodynamic profile of the animal. We present a case study on the use of accelerometers for the behavioural classification of two sea turtle species in captivity: the loggerhead ( Results: We achieved a high accuracy for behavioural classification (0.86 for loggerhead and 0.83 for green turtles). We determined that overall RF accuracy for both species is significantly higher for devices positioned on the third scute compared to the first scute ( Conclusions: Moving forward, the attachment and sampling protocols we present here may be adopted in future studies involving captive sea turtles. Further research is needed to assess their applicability and effectiveness under free-ranging conditions to enable their use in wild populations. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40317-025-00415-3.