Detectability and impact of repetitive surveys on threatened West African crocodylians: Data M1

West African crocodylians are among the most threatened and least studied crocodylian species globally. Assessing population status and establishing a basis for population monitoring is the highest priority action for this region. Monitoring of crocodiles is influenced by many factors that affect detectability, including environmental variables and individual or population-level wariness. We investigated how these factors affect detectability and counts of the Critically Endangered Mecistops cataphractus and the newly recognized Crocodylus suchus. We implemented 195 repetitive surveys at 38 sites across Côte d’Ivoire between 2014 and 2019. We used an occupancy-based approach and a count-based GLMM analysis to determine the effect of environmental and anthropogenic variables on detection, and modeled crocodile wariness over repetitive surveys. Despite their rarity and level of threat, detection probability of both species was relatively high (0.75 for M. cataphractus and 0.81 for C. such...