The volunteers are going out in the field with mobile apps to record all the data. They have a very large complete data set over years. Here is group of people with no programming experience and they already use this data in unsophisticated ways to predict when a egg will hatch so they can send one of the many volunteers to the site to make sure the turtle makes it to the ocean. They don't have any money and they weren't asking for help. If I had time I'd do this myself to start with machine learning. I was suggesting that this might be a useful dataset for machine learning. Build a model on two years of data and there is still two years of data to test it on top of people with mobile devises collecting environmental and case data every day.
Seriously, isn't this a good example where machine learning might be useful? "I made a million dollars saving sea turtles," said no one ever.