56 Figure 16. Monitoring strategy of the two sets of surveyed islets in the ‘Grand Lagon Sud’ rookery. The A-set is composed of a panel of 12 islets showing various levels of nesting intensities. It benefits the highest monitoring effort, with a minimum of six survey events throughout the nesting season. Surveys were conducted with a two to three weeks interval in between them in order to (1) take into account the loggerhead inter-nesting interval, which varies between 12 to 25 days based on available sources (Robinson et al. 2022; Barbier et al. 2023), (2) efficiently assess the primary nesting phenology parameters, prerequisite key knowledge to the use of statistical methods to quantify total seasonal number of nests, and (3) provide valuable and whenever possible exhaustive counts from one survey event to another, considering the decrease of the nest detection over time. The 16 remaining islets, composing the B-set, were monitored only twice during the season, with a two to three weeks interval at the peak of the nesting season (Jackson et al. 2008), i.e. from mid-December to mid-January (Barbier et al. 2023). It would later benefit from the nesting phenology knowledge generated through the Aset survey protocol to produce robust estimations of the seasonal total number of nests on those sites. This monitoring strategy enables a reduced survey coverage while maintaining solid estimates of seasonal total nest counts (SWOT Scientific Advisory Board 2011).
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