112 as a UNESCO world heritage site since 2008 (UNESCO 2009). This extensive area is characterized by the presence of thirty-five coral-islets remotely scattered over the park. All islets present fringing reefs and are difficult to access by low tide and/or poor weather conditions. We chose to exclude the seven islets surrounding the Isle of Pines from the study area due to much greater logistical constraints induced by extensive distances from our departure harbors. The remaining twenty-eight coral-islets of the area were seasonally monitored over the 2017-18 to 2022-23 nesting season period (Figure 22-B). Figure 22. Geographical location of the study area A: New Caledonia, South West Pacific. B: The position of the 28 monitored coral-islets of the Grand Lagon Sud nesting area, off the southern end of the mainland. Supplementary information about islets designation and geographic position are presented in Table 12 SI Appendix. Land is shown in light gray and shallow reefs are shown in blue, shapefile source: Millenium Coral Reef Mapping Project Andréfouët et al. (2009). The solid black-lined polygon indicates the extent of the UNESCO world heritage area. Data visualization was carried out with QGIS (version 3.34.3). 3.2 Nesting activity and nesting success Loggerhead turtles reproductive season occurs in New Caledonia between early November to late March (Barbier et al. 2023; Bourgogne et al. 2024c). Seasonal nesting activity surveys were conducted over the considered set of islets to characterize the intensity and the distribution of the nesting activities and of the nesting success within the GLS. Assessment of the number of nests per islet has been carried out using a specially designed protocol (see Bourgogne et al. 2024c), allowing to adapt the monitoring effort to the area’s spatial configuration where numerous, non-contiguous, distant and hard-to-reach nesting sites are used by the same nesting population.
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