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Marine Ecology Progress Series

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MEPS 634:213-223 (2020)  -  DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13202

Sampling nesting sea turtles: impact of survey error on trend detection

Andrea U. Whiting1,4,*, Milani Chaloupka2, Colin J. Limpus3

1School of Environmental and Life Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, 0909, Australia
2Ecological Modelling Services P/L, PO Box 6150, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4067, Australia
3Department of Environment and Science, PO Box 2454, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia
4Present address: PO Box 1212, Bentley DC, Western Australia 6983, Australia
*Corresponding author:

ABSTRACT: Accurately assessing trends in wildlife populations is often an ultimate goal of conservation-oriented monitoring so that conservation measures can be adopted to halt and ultimately reverse decline in population numbers. Confidence and power in detecting trends in wildlife populations are highly dependent on the biology of the target species and measurement error resulting from the survey design. We investigated the impacts of sampling errors on the power and magnitude of trend detection, using long-term surveys of 51 populations of sea turtles comprising 5 different species. We show that errors of ca. 20% in annual abundance estimates have relatively little impact on the number of years required to detect trends or the magnitude of detectable trends (for example, for a 5% change, there was an additional 2 yr for green turtles, 3 yr for leatherback turtles and 4 yr for hawksbill, flatback and loggerhead turtles). An error of ca. 20% is associated with sampling regimes with approximately 5% survey coverage. Given the naturally high inter-annual variability in nesting abundance, we suggest survey effort may be better spread across years rather than within years and may be optimised by coupling several different monitoring techniques (such as count surveys with capture-mark-recapture surveys) to optimise information on count trends and other parameters relating to the functioning of the population.


KEY WORDS: Abundance · Sampling · Turtle · Population size estimation · Trends · Accuracy · Error · Precision


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Cite this article as: Whiting AU, Chaloupka M, Limpus CJ (2020) Sampling nesting sea turtles: impact of survey error on trend detection. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 634:213-223. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13202

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