Temperature Loggers
A total of twenty Temperature Loggers where placed in several locations along some of Sal’s densest nesting areas. Bigger beaches required a second logger, usually located in the back. The loggers operated during the whole nesting season and some could not be retrieved by the end, they could be unburied and taken by any animal or human.
Most nesting happens in the south of the island and it is also where the project’s headquarters are! Locations were divided between East and West and comparisons wh
Hatchery data
At the same time nest success rates were collected form two of the project’s hatcheries (RIU and Tortuga) as hatchlings started to emerged from the relocated nests. Both hatcheries had two areas (Shaded and Unshaded), each with on logger too. Temperature profiles were also collected.
I also collected some nesting information in random spots along the densest nesting areas by plotting 5×5 m squares and digging everything inside! These plots served to compare success rates between sides of the island
Statistical Analysis
To compare sides of the island (East vs West) I used a Kruskal-Wallis’ rank sum test, followed by a Dunn’s test for pairwise comparisons (between months). To look at the 29ºC exceedances for all locations I run a One sample t-test with mor than 50% of days expected to surpass this temperature value.
Hatchery data was collected based on the the sand temperature (according to the condition – Shaded vs Unshaded). I ran a Wilcoxon rank-sum test comparing both hatcheries.
All tests where done by using RStudio and the significance level of 0.05 was applied for all tests which make a 5% probability of rejecting the null hypothesis.