The primary purpose of this thesis is to: (1) examine which local cues predators use to locate turtle nests; (2) determine if predation rates vary across different types of shading habitats; (3) examine the anthropogenic impacts of predation on turtle nests.

This thesis contains a general introduction, followed by two stand-alone data chapters, each with their own abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, management implications, acknowledgements, and references, which will be submitted to scientific journals for publication. For this reason, there is some repetition of themes and background literature in each of the two data chapters. Chapter 2 of this thesis explores the role of local sensory cues, along with habitat characteristics (i.e. vegetation shading), on turtle nest depredation with an experiment using simulated turtle nests. The goal is to determine which cues predators use to locate turtle nests, and whether those cues vary between different habitat types. Chapter 3 of this thesis presents an observational test of the hypothesis that anthropogenic structures attract predators by examining whether natural turtle nests located near anthropogenic structures have historically suffered higher mortality. The final chapter of this thesis contains concluding remarks about each of the studies and a general discussion of all results. In addition, this chapter examines the broader implications of the results, along with where further research should be directed. These chapters are then followed by an appendix, which include additional results pertinent to the research presented in Chapters 2 and 3.