Abstract
Little is known about how specific anthropogenic hazards affect the biology of organisms . Quantifying the effect of regional hazards is particularly challenging for species such as sea turtles because they are migratory, difficult to study, long lived, and face multiple anthropogenic threats . Expert elicitation, a technique used to synthesize opinions of experts while assessing uncertainty around those views, has been in use for several decades in the social science and risk assessment sectors . We conducted an internet‐based survey to quantify expert opinion on the relative magnitude of anthropogenic hazards to sea turtle populations at the regional level . Fisheries bycatch and coastal development were most often ranked as the top hazards to sea turtle species in a geographic region . Nest predation and direct take followed as the second and third greatest threats, respectively . Survey results suggest most experts believe sea turtles are threatened by multiple factors, including substantial at‐sea threats such as fisheries bycatch . Resources invested by the sea turtle community, however, appear biased toward terrestrial‐based impacts . Results from the survey are useful for conservation planning because they provide estimates of relative impacts of hazards on sea turtles and a measure of consensus on the magnitude of those impacts among researchers and practitioners . Our survey results also revealed patterns of expert bias, which we controlled for in our analysis . Respondents with no experience with respect to a sea turtle species tended to rank hazards affecting that sea turtle species higher than respondents with experience . A more‐striking pattern was with hazard‐based expertise: the more experience a respondent had with a specific hazard, the higher the respondent scored the impact of that hazard on sea turtle populations . Bias‐controlled expert opinion surveys focused on threatened species and their hazards can help guide and expedite species recovery plans .