Tobias Capel

Marine conservationist and project manager

Saint Helena, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha

About

A conservationist and project manager with a passion for scientific research, practical conservation, outreach and education.

Experience

  • Marine Plastic Project Manager at St Helena National Trust
    May 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 2 mos

  • Ascension Island Government (2 yrs 2 mos)
    • Marine Plastic Project Coordinator
      Sep 2022 - Mar 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos

    • Volunteer Crew and Training Coxswain
      Mar 2022 - Dec 2023 · 1 yr 10 mos

    • Marine Conservation Assistant
      May 2022 - Jul 2022 · 3 mos

  • Associate Lecturer at FORWARD FUTURES LIMITED
    Nov 2020 - Jan 2021 · 3 mos

    Delivered seven units on four courses: - Access to Higher Education Diploma Animal Science: Animal Behaviour Management and Advanced Mathematics. - Fast Track Access to Higher Education Diploma Healthcare: Cell Biology and Biochemistry. - BTEC L2 Animal Care: Feeding, Accommodating and Moving Animals and Animal Care Work Placement. - BTEC L1 Introductory in Land-based studies: Moving and Accommodating Animals and Developing a Personal Progression Plan. The general duties of the position included creating lesson plans, making educational resources, delivering lessons, marking and supervising animal husbandry experience or simple laboratory experiments. During this time I also created and ran a five lesson long introductory course on Animal Welfare and Behaviour and assisted in the delivery of a learning support group for learners during national lockdown.

  • Team Leader at Society for the Protection of Turtles
    May 2019 - Sep 2019 · 5 mos

    Performed day-to-day project coordination, planning, and implementation of a team of 5 - 12 individuals across 28 turtle nesting beaches in the Karpaz peninsula of Northern Cyprus. This equated to being responsible for the protection and monitoring of approximately 800 Green and Loggerhead nests. The principal duties of this role included: - Conducting daytime surveys of marine turtle activity to locate, relocate where necessary, screen, monitor and excavate nests. - Conducting night surveys to: collect behavioural and morphometric data; tag individuals (flipper and PIT tags); take biopsies where necessary, deploy temperature loggers and locate nests. - Leading fieldwork during a satellite tagging project and successfully deployed three satellite tags on nesting green turtles. This came after having previously assisted with the deployment of four satellite tags on two green and two loggerhead turtles. - Acting as hatchling coordinator overseeing the care of hatchlings found during nest excavations from beach surveys until ready for release at night. This entailed organising the release of 9645 hatchlings in 2019. - Training volunteers on the survey methodologies and project protocols. - Assisting two University of Exeter undergraduates with their dissertation data collection. - Maintaining large spreadsheets and entering survey data daily. - Conducting all accounting of financial donations to the project and expenditures. - Communicating marine conservation to members of the general public by organising multiple hatchling releases and participating in outreach by giving talks to school groups and youth groups. - Responding to calls of stranded or bycaught turtles by local fishermen in association with the Cyprus Bycatch Project.

  • Team Leader at Society for the Protection of Turtles
    Jun 2018 - Oct 2018 · 5 mos

    Performed day-to-day project coordination, planning, and implementation of a team of 5 - 12 individuals across 28 turtle nesting beaches in the Karpaz peninsula of Northern Cyprus. This equated to being responsible for the protection and monitoring of approximately 800 Green and Loggerhead nests. The principal duties of this role included: - Conducting daytime surveys of marine turtle activity to locate, relocate where necessary, screen, monitor and excavate nests. - Conducting night surveys to: collect behavioural and morphometric data; tag individuals (flipper and PIT tags); take biopsies where necessary, deploy temperature loggers and locate nests. - Acting as hatchling coordinator overseeing the care of hatchlings found during nest excavations from beach surveys until ready for release at night. This entailed organising the release of 8356 hatchlings in 2018. - Training volunteers on the survey methodologies and project protocols. - Maintaining large spreadsheets and entering survey data daily. - Conducting all accounting of financial donations to the project and expenditures. - Communicating marine conservation to members of the general public by organising multiple hatchling releases and participating in outreach by giving talks to school groups and youth groups.