54 the perimeter of the islet were recorded, along with date, site, GPS localization and nature of the detected activity based on the available cues: crawgrls up and down the beach, aborted or successful nest as materialized by the characteristic body pit tracks. Figure 15. Geographical location of the study area, in the 'Grand Lagon Sud' of New Caledonia. A: New Caledonia, South West Pacific. B: Position of the 28 surveyed sites within the 'Grand Lagon Sud' area, off the southern end of the main island of New Caledonia. Land is shown in light grey and shallow reefs are shown in blue, shapefile source: Millenium Coral Reef Mapping Project (Andréfouët et al. 2009). Data visualization has been carried out with QGIS (version 3.34.3). Knowing that only the loggerhead and the Green turtles Chelonia mydas (Linnaeus, 1758) are nesting in New Caledonia (Pilcher 2021), species identification was assessed through crawling track observations. 99.9% of all tracks were confirmed as asymmetrical, thus assigned to loggerhead turtles (Pritchard and Mortimer 1999). The average perimeter length of the islets is 813.2 m (+ 310.0), and the average duration for a person to complete an islet patrol is 39.5 min (+ 3.4). We chose to use nest counts as the proxy for annual population abundance in this study. The selection of this count unit, rather than the more classical female crawling tracks, has been motivated by our incapacity to visit nesting beaches more than on a weekly basis at best. In this context, the higher persistence in time of body pits compared to crawl tracks makes
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