CHS Blog

Conservation priorities for the freshwater turtles of Canada

February 20, 2026
Patrick Moldowan,
Research Assistant, Turtle Survival Alliance

Blanding’s Turtle, Emydoidea blandingii.
Photo: Patrick Moldowan

The Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA), a U.S. charitable organization, works internationally to advance its mission to protect and restore wild populations of tortoises and freshwater turtles through science-based conservation, global leadership, and local stewardship. With a shared global vision of a world where turtles thrive in the wild, Turtle Survival Alliance Canada (TSA Canada) has officially launched as a registered Canadian charity based in Toronto. TSA Canada is an independent organization that aims to secure a future for the world’s most threatened turtle species.

One of the first actions of TSA in Canada is to assess the knowledge gaps and conservation priorities for the freshwater turtles of Canada. Although Canada has comparatively few turtle species, those that are present are of high conservation concern. The highest diversity and largest populations of turtles (and flora and fauna, generally) occurs in the warmer and higher productivity southern regions of Canada. The human population follows a similar pattern: two out of three Canadians (66%) live in southern Canada, within 100 kilometres of the United States border, an area that represents only 4% of the land area of the country (Statistics Canada 2023). Likewise, Canada’s agriculture, industry, and roads are concentrated in the south, making for a challenging landscape in which to conduct conservation.


National conservation statuses of the turtles of Canada as assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), November 2025. Not at Risk: Western Painted Turtle (Prairie/Western Boreal-Canadian Shield population); Special Concern: Midland Painted Turtle, Eastern Painted Turtle, Western Painted Turtle (Intermountain-Rocky Mountain population), Snapping Turtle, Eastern Musk Turtle, and Northern Map Turtle; Threatened: Western Painted Turtle (Pacific Coast population) and Wood Turtle; Endangered: Eastern Spiny Softshell, Blanding’s Turtle (Great Lakes/St. Lawrence and Nova Scotia populations), and Spotted Turtle; and Extirpated: Pacific Pond Turtle and Eastern Box Turtle.
Photo: Turtle illustrations courtesy Shutterstock (Eastern Box Turtle), “pngwing” (Western Pond Turtle), and Adopt-A-Pond Program, Toronto Zoo (all others).

Alongside other priority regions—including Central America, southern Africa, Indochina, and Australia to start—the assessment of Canadian turtles is an important step to understanding what we know, what we don’t know, and, importantly, what we ought to know to effectively implement conservation actions. Working with leading turtle biologists in Canada, we are building on the framework of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) by recognizing the same designable units (DU), resulting in 13 taxa–populations under assessment. This conservation priority assessment has two key steps.

First, through review of the primary literature, each taxon/DU is evaluated for 19 criteria that are important for informing species biology and vulnerability to threats. These criteria include fundamentals such as population size estimates, size/age at sexual maturity, diet in the wild, home range size, clutch size, reproductive frequency, survival estimates, and longevity and generation time, among other biological traits. The resulting Research Score informs the state of knowledge and knowledge gaps for each species. This metric can be used to inform research priorities moving forward.

Second, a Conservation Priority Score is calculated as a measure of four components: