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Due to the rampant egg take, in situ incu-bation on the beaches is not an acceptable management practice for a long term con-servation of this population. Hence, the primary goals in the near future would be:

(1) to increase female production in boxes;

and (2) to start a programme of relocation of clutches to safer areas (Pritchard 1995;

DeGregorio and Southwood Williard 2011) while progressively reducing incubation in boxes. For the first goal, boxes are being ex-posed to direct sunlight during a few hours a day to raise incubation temperatures and increase the proportion of females pro-duced (see Chantrapornsyl 1992). For the second goal, financial resources must be invested to strengthen the protection of a beach section near Mano Juan village as a safe area for clutch relocation.

Further research on beach temperature pat-terns is needed to increase understanding of the natural sex-ratio at Saona in order to improve conservation measures. Togeth-er with the artificial incubation programme we carried out additional measures such as hiring people from the local community to work as field technicians, organizing work-shops and meetings with authorities, as well as environmental education and awareness programmes. These measures have appar-ently positively influenced local attitudes and perceptions toward marine turtles in Saona (White et al. 2011) which we strongly

believe will favour a future programme of clutch relocation on the beach.

ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present study is included as part of a conservation programme funded by the Spanish International Cooperation Agency (AECI, projects: A/2991/05 and A/5641/06), the Spanish Ministry of Ed-ucation and Sciences (CGL2006-02936-BOS), the General Foundation of the University of Valencia, and the European Union (Marie Curie grants, FP6 and 7). We specially thank the support of the Domini-can non-governmental organization Grupo Jaragua and of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). The project counts on the support of the Dominican Environmental author-ities (Office of Protected Areas and Biodi-versity of the Environmental Ministry) and the rangers of the Del Este National Park.

We are very grateful to fieldwork assistants especially to Pelagio Paulino ‘Negro’ and Bernardo Paulino ‘Mico’ for their help during fieldwork in Saona and their hard work in the conservation of Saona marine turtles. We extend our thanks to the Domin-ican and international students, volunteers and local villagers who helped in different tasks of the project and who lent their help and friendship during the work in the Do-minican Republic. J. Azar, J.A. Raga and J.

Tomás are supported by project Prometeo/

2011/40 of Conselleria de Educacio (Gen-eralitat Valenciana) and project CGL2011-30413 of the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Innovation. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments and sugges-tions that improved the manuscript.

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