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segments outside the project area. For this reason, pre-construction monitoring and monitoring of a separate control area will not be necessary for an assessment of the effects of the project on nesting levels and nesting success . There is also sufficient hatch success data available for the area to establish a baseline against which to evaluate potential project effects on hatching success. Changes in emergence and nesting levels, and nesting success (the proportion of emergences that culminate in nests) will be assessed by daily nesting surveys of project area beaches . Survey areas will be patrolled every morning during the nesting season, and all crawls will be counted, identified to species, and classified as a nesting or non- nesting emergence (Schroeder and Murphy in Eckert et al. , 1999) . Project area beach segments will be divided into 1000-foot long survey zones referenced to FDEP beach monuments . Starting and ending dates for surveying will be established so as to allow direct comparisons with existing nesting survey data in the County. Nesting levels (nests per 1000 feet) and nesting success (nests/total emergences) will be calculated separately for each 1000 foot survey zone. Mean nesting success and mean nesting levels will be statistically compared between pre- and post-construction years in project and control areas using ANOVA. Calculations will be performed separately for each species, with the understanding that green turtle and leatherback data may not be sufficient for statistical analysis . Reproductive success will be evaluated by examining the nest contents of a representative sample of in-situ nests. All nest excavation and handling and release of live hatchlings shall be in accordance with FWCC guidelines. Expected nesting levels will be used to design a random selection method resulting in a minimum of 50 nests selected for hatching success evaluation. Effort will be made to insure that samples are representative of the entire beach and the entire nesting season. In evaluating reproductive success, nest contents will be assigned to one of the following categories : hatched egg, unhatched egg, pipped egg (live hatchling), pipped egg (dead hatchling) , live hatchling, and dead hatchling. Hatching success will be calculated as the percentage of eggs from a clutch producing hatchlings that successfully freed themselves from the egg [(hatched eggs/total clutch size) x 100%] . Emerging success is the percentage of the clutch producing hatchlings that successfully emerged from the nest { [hatched eggs — (live + dead hatchlings remaining in nest) / total clutch size] x 100% } . Reproductive success indices will be statistically compared to available control data using ANOVA to detect significant differences among means in sample groups in both project and control areas . In conjunction with daily turtle nesting surveys, we would suggest that USFWS and FWCC consider relocation of turtle nests laid in areas of the restored beach that are highly susceptible to being lost to erosion. As restored beaches equilibrate in the first year following construction, nests laid in the seaward portions of the beach berm are very vulnerable to being washed out. A recent comprehensive study of a beach restoration project in Martin County (Ecological Associates, Inc. 1999) identified such erosional losses as a major and easily preventable impact. Relocation would be restricted to the first nesting season following construction in the project area, and only nests deemed highly vulnerable would be relocated. All relocations will be conducted in accordance 9