26th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, March 16-18, 2001
Abstracts

Tortoise Research in the Sonoran Desert

Cecil R. Schwalbe
Research Scientist, USGS, Sonoran Desert Field Station, Room 125 Biological Sciences East, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721

Federal listing of the Mojave population of the desert tortoise as threatened in 1990 created a stir among managers and conservationists and spurred much research on that population. The subsequent determination by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that listing of the Sonoran population was not warranted has resulted in a disparity of funding for tortoise research and management between the two deserts. However, using a variety of State and Federal funding sources in the 1990's, researchers learned much about the basic ecology of the Sonoran tortoise with regards to diet, health profiles, activity patterns, and reproductive effort. Despite this effort, we still do not understand some of the most important questions about limits to distributions and population growth, and the effects of roads and other dispersal barriers on populations. I will give a brief overview of the important findings from this past decade of research and discuss ongoing and new research on the Sonoran desert tortoise.