There have been efforts around the globe to track individuals of many marine species and assess their movements and distribution, with the putative goal of supporting their conservation and management. Determining whether, and how, tracking data have been successfully applied to address real-world conservation issues is, however, difficult. Here, we compile a broad range of case studies from diverse marine taxa to show how tracking data have helped inform conservation policy and management, including reductions in fisheries bycatch and vessel strikes, and the design and administration of marine protected areas and important habitats. Using these examples, we highlight pathways through which the past and future investment in collecting animal tracking data might be better used to achieve tangible conservation benefits.

Since late 2014, the Mexican Caribbean coast has periodically received massive, atypical influxes of pelagic Sargassum spp. (sargasso). Negative impacts associated with these influxes include mortality of nearshore benthic flora and fauna, beach erosion, pollution, decreasing tourism and high management costs. To understand the dynamics of the sargasso influx, we used Landsat 8 imagery (from 2016 to mid-2020) to record the coverage of sargasso in the sea off the Mexican Caribbean coastline, with a maximum reported in September 2018. Satellite image analysis also showed local differences in the quantity of beached sargasso along the coastline. Over the years, good practice for collection on the beach and for off-shore collection of sargasso have been established through trial and error, and the Mexican Government and hotel industry have spent millions of dollars on removal and off-shore detention of sargasso. Notwithstanding, sargasso also has various properties that could be harnessed in local industries. The stimulation of local industrial growth would offer alternatives to the dependence on tourism, as a circular economy, based on sargasso, is developed.

Recently, the need for quantitative information on the spatiotemporal distribution of floating macroalgae, particularly the two species of genus Sargassum, has grown because of blooms of these species in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Remote sensing is one of the most frequently used tools to assess pelagic Sargassum distribution. The purpose of this study was to implement a methodological approach to detect floating algae in an efficient and replicable manner at a moderate cost. We analyzed Landsat 8 imagery, from which we calculated four vegetation indices and one floating-algae index to implement a supervised classification, together with the bands 2 and 5, using the Random Forest algorithm. The analysis was performed monthly from 2014 to 2015 for the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, with a total of 91 analyzed images. The quantitative performance metrics of the classifier (overall, Kappa and Tau) were greater than 80%, whereas bands 2 and 5 as well as the atmospherically resistant vegetation index made the greatest contributions to the classifications. During summer 2015, more than 4,000 ha of Sargassum coverage per image were observed, which was substantially greater than that over the rest of the period. This approach constitutes a transferable alternative for the systematic detection of Sargassum, which enables a quantitative semi-automated time series comparison.

The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of threatened species will be achieved. We assembled a multi-taxa tracking dataset (11 million geopositions from 15,845 tracked individuals across 121 species) to provide a global assessment of space use of highly mobile marine megafauna, showing that 63% of the area that they cover is used 80% of the time as important migratory corridors or residence areas. The GBF 30% threshold (Target 3) will be insufficient for marine megafauna’s effective conservation, leaving important areas exposed to major anthropogenic threats. Coupling area protection with mitigation strategies (e.g., fishing regulation, wildlife-traffic separation) will be essential to reach international goals and conserve biodiversity.

Sea turtles are vulnerable to climate change since their reproductive output is influenced by incubating temperatures, with warmer temperatures causing lower hatching success and increased feminization of embryos. Their ability to cope with projected increases in ambient temperatures will depend on their capacity to adapt to shifts in climatic regimes. Here, we assessed the extent to which phenological shifts could mitigate impacts from increases in ambient temperatures (from 1.5 to 3°C in air temperatures and from 1.4 to 2.3°C in sea surface temperatures by 2100 at our sites) on four species of sea turtles, under a “middle of the road” scenario (SSP2‐4.5). Sand temperatures at sea turtle nesting sites are projected to increase from 0.58 to 4.17°C by 2100 and expected shifts in nesting of 26–43 days earlier will not be sufficient to maintain current incubation temperatures at 7 (29%) of our sites, hatching success rates at 10 (42%) of our sites, with current trends in hatchling sex ratio being able to be maintained at half of the sites. We also calculated the phenological shifts that would be required (both backward for an earlier shift in nesting and forward for a later shift) to keep up with present‐day incubation temperatures, hatching success rates, and sex ratios. The required shifts backward in nesting for incubation temperatures ranged from −20 to −191 days, whereas the required shifts forward ranged from +54 to +180 days. However, for half of the sites, no matter the shift the median incubation temperature will always be warmer than the 75th percentile of current ranges. Given that phenological shifts will not be able to ameliorate predicted changes in temperature, hatching success and sex ratio at most sites, turtles may need to use other adaptive responses and/or there is the need to enhance sea turtle resilience to climate warming.