3.5 Million Acres of Mojave Desert Where Military Trains
Designated State’s First Sentinel Landscape
Millions of acres of the Mojave Desert, home to five military bases and at least 40 protected species, including the desert tortoise and Joshua trees, will have more protection thanks to a designation as California’s first Sentinel Landscape.
The 3.5 million acres located north of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire received the distinction this week in an announcement from the Sentinel Landscape Partnership, a collaboration between the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Interior that was formed in 2013. The area includes multi-use public lands, farmlands, recreational lands and military training areas and lies in the desert between Ridgecrest and the Morongo Basin.
The 3.5 million acres located north of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire received the distinction this week in an announcement from the Sentinel Landscape Partnership, a collaboration between the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Interior that was formed in 2013. The area includes multi-use public lands, farmlands, recreational lands and military training areas and lies in the desert between Ridgecrest and the Morongo Basin.
Roy Averill-Murray resembles a thinner Kevin Costner with a less-pronounced chin, wearing sunglasses and with a tortoise embroidered on his baseball cap. The most controversial figure in desert biology, he radiates an affability that earns the deep affection of his field workers. Whenever they come in from the desert, he has a cooler of beer waiting. He did his master's thesis on the tortoise at the University of Arizona, and worked for the state's Game and Fish Department as desert tortoise coordinator before joining the federal agency. "I've been working on tortoises for 22 years," he says. "I turned 45 this year and realized it was getting to the point that it has been close to half my life."
Just as Averill-Murray started his new job, trouble erupted over a habitat conservation plan arranged in 1990 between Clark County, Nev., and federal regulators. Under that plan, developers had agreed to build and donate a 222-acre tortoise holding facility, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, in south Las Vegas. For every acre of tortoise habitat lost to houses, a fee would be paid toward the running of the place, which would take in displaced wild tortoises. These animals would then be translocated, donated for lab experiments or, if diseased, humanely dispatched.
From 1990 through 2005, habitat conservation plans mimicking the Vegas model were written to cover millions of acres across Nevada and California. The parcels making up the 6.4 million acres of critical habitat became ever more isolated from one another by industrialization. In 2005, a wave of military expansions and solar and wind farms began to hit the Mojave. Of many mitigation schemes stipulated by these habitat conservation plans, from covering landfills and sewage ponds to restricting off-road vehicle use, one of the most common required purchasing mitigation land for displaced tortoises.
That soon revealed more problems with translocation schemes. There just isn't that much good unoccupied desert left, for one. "The habitat is basically full," says Berry, and in places where native populations have declined, it doesn't make sense to release more tortoises until you know why the original residents died out. Also, unless a mitigation area is protected, the animals might eventually get moved again.
Back in southern Nevada, the very facility created by the original habitat conservation model was falling apart. It had looked good on paper -- until the center began filling up, not just with displaced wild tortoises, but also surrendered pets, either captured before the species was listed or the offspring of such captives. "It's ironic that it's a threatened species and that they do so well in captivity and that creates this overabundance," says Averill- Murray. "They started piling up and piling up and piling up."
Overcrowding got so bad that, starting in 1995, more than 9,000 tortoises were released on BLM land near Jean, Nev. Nobody knows how many survived. "If you go out there today, there are a lot of dead tortoises," says Averill-Murray.
In 2010, Clark County stopped funding the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, saying it was no longer fulfilling its original purpose. Averill-Murray doesn't blame the county. "They were spending over a million per year just dealing with pet tortoises. That's funding that wasn't going to conservation or recovery," he says. Since that time, the center has struggled to survive and is scheduled to close in 2014.
By 2011, turtle-moving was making national news. The Fish and Wildlife Service gave BrightSource Energy permission to displace roughly three dozen adult tortoises for its planned 3,500-acre Ivanpah Valley solar complex on the California-Nevada border, spurred by a federal goal stating that by 2015 plans must be in place for "renewable energy projects located on the public lands with a generation capacity of at least 10,000 megawatts of electricity."
But as tortoise after tortoise was unearthed in Ivanpah Valley, it became apparent that there were many more than originally thought -- perhaps 1,000 animals, if hatchlings and juveniles were included. After an attempt in court by the Western Watersheds Project to halt construction failed, BrightSource CEO John Woolard insisted he was actually saving turtles, telling the House Oversight Committee in 2012, "We expect to return more desert tortoises to the wild than were captured on site, as we have had over 50 new hatchling tortoises born in captivity at Ivanpah in the temporary pens last fall."
Amid the emerging chaos in Ivanpah, in March 2011, biologists poured into Las Vegas for the long-awaited revision of the recovery plan. "Everyone in the environmental community felt like this is the big unveiling moment," says Ileene Anderson, the Center for Biological Diversity's desert specialist. But it turned out that the plan was missing a crucial component. "There was this roomful, 70 or 80 people there, and then they say they didn't have time to do a renewable energy chapter, so they would add that later. It was bizarre."
"When we started the revision process (in 2004) all this renewable energy wasn't on the radar," explains Averill- Murray, "so we really didn't address those issues head on … It would have taken a wholesale change at the eleventh hour." He expects the chapter on renewable energy impacts to come out of review by the end of this year.
Once it does, given the political push toward renewable energy, Fish and Wildlife is unlikely to stymie future solar or wind power projects. But some things may be changing. "To industry's credit," says Anderson, "at least the solar folks learned their lesson with Ivanpah. They're now trying to do due diligence and select places they know have fewer tortoises." Massive solar projects are even being sited on former agricultural land instead of pristine desert.
Nonetheless, just under 52,000 acres of federal land in the Southwest, much of it tortoise habitat, have been approved for solar projects, according to BLM energy liaison Ray Brady. On top of 37 renewable energy projects licensed since 2009, the BLM is considering 20 more proposals, 14 for solar and six for wind. The agency's final environmental impact statement for solar energy zones in tortoise territory in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California, asserts that, "Despite some risk of mortality or decreased fitness of the desert tortoise, translocation is widely accepted as a useful strategy for the conservation of this species." As evidence, it repeatedly cites a 2007 paper by Averill-Murray's team that tracked just 32 translocated animals for two years, during which a fifth of the tortoises died.
Averill-Murray's team is now working with biologists from the San Diego Zoo to use the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center's 2,000 or so captive tortoises, some of which have been exposed to Mycoplasma, in translocation experiments. Averill-Murray recognizes the risk of spreading illness to wild populations, but says, "Disease is a normal fact of life. It's unrealistic to expect that there's going to be a pure wild population out there that we're somehow going to contaminate."
Since the 1971 dumping of turtles on China Lake, translocation methods have steadily improved. Animals now must be released early in the morning and in spring, when forage and water are more available. Averill-Murray's group wants to refine the process further. So they've been experimenting to see how juveniles, which are more vulnerable to predators but theoretically less bonded to a previous habitat, do in an ongoing translocation of young turtles to the Nevada Test Site. In another experiment, they're releasing tortoises in more sheltered washes instead of in open basins, which had been widely done in the past, and rather than dipping them in a hydrating bath before release, they're injecting them with saline solution.
On the last day of April, as Averill-Murray and the San Diego Zoo team prepared 32 tortoises from the Center, a young post-doc named Jen Germano used ultrasound on female translocatees to see if they were carrying eggs. They hope the released animals will produce hatchlings to repopulate Trout Canyon, a Joshua tree-studded crease in the Pahrump Valley where once-plentiful tortoises have become scarce. Researchers in a shade tent use putty to attach radio transmitters to shells for tracking. The animals are so tame that they don't withdraw into their shells when handled. That's a defense they will quickly rediscover, says Germano: "They learn pretty fast how to be tortoises again."
The day after the animals are tested for disease and tagged, Averill-Murray's team meets at dawn and loads them up: 16 outwardly healthy but Mycoplasma-positive tortoises and 16 that have tested negative. If, as he suspects, positive antibody status is nothing more than evidence of a tortoise with a well-educated immune system and the Kern County tortoises so badly hit by Mycoplasma in 1988 were uniquely vulnerable, then that frees up a lot of experimental animals for future use.
At Trout Canyon, they're removed from the straw nests in their traveling cases, injected with saline and carried to selected locations in sheltered washes. Field staffers are visibly moved as they set the captives free. "Look at you in your new home," one biologist murmurs to GT3125, a female perhaps 20 years old.
A raven circles overhead as the tortoises begin to explore their surroundings. As the scientists depart, a civilian truck carrying a bright red dune buggy waits to drive up the dirt road towards where the tortoises are tasting their first, and possibly last, wildflowers. The tortoises will be monitored for the next five years, says Averill-Murray, provided that they survive and that funds for such monitoring last.
Just as Averill-Murray started his new job, trouble erupted over a habitat conservation plan arranged in 1990 between Clark County, Nev., and federal regulators. Under that plan, developers had agreed to build and donate a 222-acre tortoise holding facility, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, in south Las Vegas. For every acre of tortoise habitat lost to houses, a fee would be paid toward the running of the place, which would take in displaced wild tortoises. These animals would then be translocated, donated for lab experiments or, if diseased, humanely dispatched.
From 1990 through 2005, habitat conservation plans mimicking the Vegas model were written to cover millions of acres across Nevada and California. The parcels making up the 6.4 million acres of critical habitat became ever more isolated from one another by industrialization. In 2005, a wave of military expansions and solar and wind farms began to hit the Mojave. Of many mitigation schemes stipulated by these habitat conservation plans, from covering landfills and sewage ponds to restricting off-road vehicle use, one of the most common required purchasing mitigation land for displaced tortoises.
That soon revealed more problems with translocation schemes. There just isn't that much good unoccupied desert left, for one. "The habitat is basically full," says Berry, and in places where native populations have declined, it doesn't make sense to release more tortoises until you know why the original residents died out. Also, unless a mitigation area is protected, the animals might eventually get moved again.
Back in southern Nevada, the very facility created by the original habitat conservation model was falling apart. It had looked good on paper -- until the center began filling up, not just with displaced wild tortoises, but also surrendered pets, either captured before the species was listed or the offspring of such captives. "It's ironic that it's a threatened species and that they do so well in captivity and that creates this overabundance," says Averill- Murray. "They started piling up and piling up and piling up."
Overcrowding got so bad that, starting in 1995, more than 9,000 tortoises were released on BLM land near Jean, Nev. Nobody knows how many survived. "If you go out there today, there are a lot of dead tortoises," says Averill-Murray.
In 2010, Clark County stopped funding the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, saying it was no longer fulfilling its original purpose. Averill-Murray doesn't blame the county. "They were spending over a million per year just dealing with pet tortoises. That's funding that wasn't going to conservation or recovery," he says. Since that time, the center has struggled to survive and is scheduled to close in 2014.
By 2011, turtle-moving was making national news. The Fish and Wildlife Service gave BrightSource Energy permission to displace roughly three dozen adult tortoises for its planned 3,500-acre Ivanpah Valley solar complex on the California-Nevada border, spurred by a federal goal stating that by 2015 plans must be in place for "renewable energy projects located on the public lands with a generation capacity of at least 10,000 megawatts of electricity."
But as tortoise after tortoise was unearthed in Ivanpah Valley, it became apparent that there were many more than originally thought -- perhaps 1,000 animals, if hatchlings and juveniles were included. After an attempt in court by the Western Watersheds Project to halt construction failed, BrightSource CEO John Woolard insisted he was actually saving turtles, telling the House Oversight Committee in 2012, "We expect to return more desert tortoises to the wild than were captured on site, as we have had over 50 new hatchling tortoises born in captivity at Ivanpah in the temporary pens last fall."
Amid the emerging chaos in Ivanpah, in March 2011, biologists poured into Las Vegas for the long-awaited revision of the recovery plan. "Everyone in the environmental community felt like this is the big unveiling moment," says Ileene Anderson, the Center for Biological Diversity's desert specialist. But it turned out that the plan was missing a crucial component. "There was this roomful, 70 or 80 people there, and then they say they didn't have time to do a renewable energy chapter, so they would add that later. It was bizarre."
"When we started the revision process (in 2004) all this renewable energy wasn't on the radar," explains Averill- Murray, "so we really didn't address those issues head on … It would have taken a wholesale change at the eleventh hour." He expects the chapter on renewable energy impacts to come out of review by the end of this year.
Once it does, given the political push toward renewable energy, Fish and Wildlife is unlikely to stymie future solar or wind power projects. But some things may be changing. "To industry's credit," says Anderson, "at least the solar folks learned their lesson with Ivanpah. They're now trying to do due diligence and select places they know have fewer tortoises." Massive solar projects are even being sited on former agricultural land instead of pristine desert.
Nonetheless, just under 52,000 acres of federal land in the Southwest, much of it tortoise habitat, have been approved for solar projects, according to BLM energy liaison Ray Brady. On top of 37 renewable energy projects licensed since 2009, the BLM is considering 20 more proposals, 14 for solar and six for wind. The agency's final environmental impact statement for solar energy zones in tortoise territory in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California, asserts that, "Despite some risk of mortality or decreased fitness of the desert tortoise, translocation is widely accepted as a useful strategy for the conservation of this species." As evidence, it repeatedly cites a 2007 paper by Averill-Murray's team that tracked just 32 translocated animals for two years, during which a fifth of the tortoises died.
Averill-Murray's team is now working with biologists from the San Diego Zoo to use the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center's 2,000 or so captive tortoises, some of which have been exposed to Mycoplasma, in translocation experiments. Averill-Murray recognizes the risk of spreading illness to wild populations, but says, "Disease is a normal fact of life. It's unrealistic to expect that there's going to be a pure wild population out there that we're somehow going to contaminate."
Since the 1971 dumping of turtles on China Lake, translocation methods have steadily improved. Animals now must be released early in the morning and in spring, when forage and water are more available. Averill-Murray's group wants to refine the process further. So they've been experimenting to see how juveniles, which are more vulnerable to predators but theoretically less bonded to a previous habitat, do in an ongoing translocation of young turtles to the Nevada Test Site. In another experiment, they're releasing tortoises in more sheltered washes instead of in open basins, which had been widely done in the past, and rather than dipping them in a hydrating bath before release, they're injecting them with saline solution.
On the last day of April, as Averill-Murray and the San Diego Zoo team prepared 32 tortoises from the Center, a young post-doc named Jen Germano used ultrasound on female translocatees to see if they were carrying eggs. They hope the released animals will produce hatchlings to repopulate Trout Canyon, a Joshua tree-studded crease in the Pahrump Valley where once-plentiful tortoises have become scarce. Researchers in a shade tent use putty to attach radio transmitters to shells for tracking. The animals are so tame that they don't withdraw into their shells when handled. That's a defense they will quickly rediscover, says Germano: "They learn pretty fast how to be tortoises again."
The day after the animals are tested for disease and tagged, Averill-Murray's team meets at dawn and loads them up: 16 outwardly healthy but Mycoplasma-positive tortoises and 16 that have tested negative. If, as he suspects, positive antibody status is nothing more than evidence of a tortoise with a well-educated immune system and the Kern County tortoises so badly hit by Mycoplasma in 1988 were uniquely vulnerable, then that frees up a lot of experimental animals for future use.
At Trout Canyon, they're removed from the straw nests in their traveling cases, injected with saline and carried to selected locations in sheltered washes. Field staffers are visibly moved as they set the captives free. "Look at you in your new home," one biologist murmurs to GT3125, a female perhaps 20 years old.
A raven circles overhead as the tortoises begin to explore their surroundings. As the scientists depart, a civilian truck carrying a bright red dune buggy waits to drive up the dirt road towards where the tortoises are tasting their first, and possibly last, wildflowers. The tortoises will be monitored for the next five years, says Averill-Murray, provided that they survive and that funds for such monitoring last.
Almost a quarter century has passed since the Mojave desert tortoise was first listed. Nineteen years have gone by since Berry co-authored a recovery plan that, if implemented, might well have succeeded by now, say conservation groups. That 1994 plan sought to return tortoise numbers to where they were before Mycoplasma hit. The new plan seems less ambitious, with a goal of reaching the numbers found in 2001, when Fish and Wildlife began its own range-wide monitoring.
Both the original and revised plans were filled with suggestions about what should be done to recover the tortoise in addition to translocation. Over the years, federal agencies have spent millions to acquire land, install protective fences, retire grazing allotments, limit off-roading, cover landfills and close trails.
Some pieces of the 6.4 million acres of BLM land designated as critical habitat in 1994 have changed jurisdiction since then, including millions of acres transferred to the National Park Service. Most critical habitat remaining under BLM management now has special protection as "areas of critical environmental concern" or "desert wildlife management areas"; in the latter, development is limited to 1 percent of the total area. The USGS and FWS are working with energy planners to retain wildlife corridors between critical habitat areas. And yet, according to a 2012 study in BioScience by Averill-Murray and others, the "effectiveness of most recovery actions is … unknown," and in many parts of its range, the tortoise continues to decline.
"If we don't get serious about taking away some of the stressors on tortoises," says Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity, "they may go extinct. We need habitat where the highest priority is desert tortoise conservation and where we can remove the other threats." She ticks off the big national parks, none of which are really prime tortoise territory: Death Valley is too low and too hot, while Joshua Tree's most suitable habitat is too accessible to humans, and the Mojave National Preserve allows grazing. The animal's best hope, she says, can be seen at the Desert Tortoise Natural Area that Berry helped found. It's fenced off and entirely dedicated to tortoises; other uses are excluded, including off-road vehicles. "Data from there show tortoise densities much higher than in critical habitat managed by the BLM next door," she says, citing research being done by Berry and others. "(Their) study will provide a compass on how to manage for tortoises."
And Fort Irwin, perhaps, provides a "how not to" for tortoise management. Five years after the 158 healthy tortoises tagged for Berry's study were moved, she says, "84 are dead. Another 21 are missing. Six or seven of those, we're sure they're dead. We found chewed-up transmitters."
She will track the survivors through the bleak hills near Barstow to get a long-term picture of their survival rate. For such long-lived animals, five years of living after being uprooted might still end in slow starvation, or they might genuinely be re-establishing themselves. "We still don't know if translocation works," Berry says. "We need long-term studies. We need numbers."
Even if translocation techniques are improved, she firmly believes that the best thing that can be done for the desert tortoise is to leave it alone. And in the most protected areas, that might happen. But elsewhere across a 48,000-square-mile desert, it seems inevitable that tortoise-moving will continue. For Berry, every inch a product of the late-'60s ecology movement, it's intolerable to contemplate that the animal she's devoted her life to might become dependent on the kindness of rangers.
Berry continues gathering data from her plots and transects across the Mojave and part of the Sonoran deserts. By the time she retires, says her boss, Steve Schwarzbach, her life's work will appear in what he calls her "masterpiece": the longest, most extensive survey of the animal's demographics and survival rates ever done, and a mighty study of the tortoise's passage into the Anthropocene. His provisional title for it: "The 40-year decline of the desert tortoise."
Yet when Berry is asked if she gets depressed chronicling the disappearance of an animal older than recorded history, she seems surprised. Then, in her flat, matter-of-fact way, she replies, "People like myself, the best we can do is present the best possible science and be an advocate for its use. I don't allow myself to get depressed because it takes up time -- and I don't have that much left."
Award-winning reporter Emily Green is an environmental writer based in Los Angeles. She blogs about Western water at www.chanceofrain.com.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.
© High Country News
This article originally appeared in the Aug. 5, 2013 issue of High Country News (hcn.org)
Both the original and revised plans were filled with suggestions about what should be done to recover the tortoise in addition to translocation. Over the years, federal agencies have spent millions to acquire land, install protective fences, retire grazing allotments, limit off-roading, cover landfills and close trails.
Some pieces of the 6.4 million acres of BLM land designated as critical habitat in 1994 have changed jurisdiction since then, including millions of acres transferred to the National Park Service. Most critical habitat remaining under BLM management now has special protection as "areas of critical environmental concern" or "desert wildlife management areas"; in the latter, development is limited to 1 percent of the total area. The USGS and FWS are working with energy planners to retain wildlife corridors between critical habitat areas. And yet, according to a 2012 study in BioScience by Averill-Murray and others, the "effectiveness of most recovery actions is … unknown," and in many parts of its range, the tortoise continues to decline.
"If we don't get serious about taking away some of the stressors on tortoises," says Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity, "they may go extinct. We need habitat where the highest priority is desert tortoise conservation and where we can remove the other threats." She ticks off the big national parks, none of which are really prime tortoise territory: Death Valley is too low and too hot, while Joshua Tree's most suitable habitat is too accessible to humans, and the Mojave National Preserve allows grazing. The animal's best hope, she says, can be seen at the Desert Tortoise Natural Area that Berry helped found. It's fenced off and entirely dedicated to tortoises; other uses are excluded, including off-road vehicles. "Data from there show tortoise densities much higher than in critical habitat managed by the BLM next door," she says, citing research being done by Berry and others. "(Their) study will provide a compass on how to manage for tortoises."
And Fort Irwin, perhaps, provides a "how not to" for tortoise management. Five years after the 158 healthy tortoises tagged for Berry's study were moved, she says, "84 are dead. Another 21 are missing. Six or seven of those, we're sure they're dead. We found chewed-up transmitters."
She will track the survivors through the bleak hills near Barstow to get a long-term picture of their survival rate. For such long-lived animals, five years of living after being uprooted might still end in slow starvation, or they might genuinely be re-establishing themselves. "We still don't know if translocation works," Berry says. "We need long-term studies. We need numbers."
Even if translocation techniques are improved, she firmly believes that the best thing that can be done for the desert tortoise is to leave it alone. And in the most protected areas, that might happen. But elsewhere across a 48,000-square-mile desert, it seems inevitable that tortoise-moving will continue. For Berry, every inch a product of the late-'60s ecology movement, it's intolerable to contemplate that the animal she's devoted her life to might become dependent on the kindness of rangers.
Berry continues gathering data from her plots and transects across the Mojave and part of the Sonoran deserts. By the time she retires, says her boss, Steve Schwarzbach, her life's work will appear in what he calls her "masterpiece": the longest, most extensive survey of the animal's demographics and survival rates ever done, and a mighty study of the tortoise's passage into the Anthropocene. His provisional title for it: "The 40-year decline of the desert tortoise."
Yet when Berry is asked if she gets depressed chronicling the disappearance of an animal older than recorded history, she seems surprised. Then, in her flat, matter-of-fact way, she replies, "People like myself, the best we can do is present the best possible science and be an advocate for its use. I don't allow myself to get depressed because it takes up time -- and I don't have that much left."
Award-winning reporter Emily Green is an environmental writer based in Los Angeles. She blogs about Western water at www.chanceofrain.com.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.
© High Country News
This article originally appeared in the Aug. 5, 2013 issue of High Country News (hcn.org)
Definition of an Endangered Species
Agassiz's desert tortoise is now on the list of the world's most endangered tortoises and freshwater turtles. It is in the top 50 species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Species Survival Commission, Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, now considers Agassiz's desert tortoise to be Critically Endangered (Turtle Conservation Coalition 2018).
The IUCN places a taxon in the Critically Endangered category when the best available evidence indicates that it meets one or more of the criteria for Critically Endangered. These criteria are (1) population decline - a substantial (>80 percent) reduction in population size in the last 10 years; (2) geographic decline - a substantial reduction in extent of occurrence, area of occupancy, area/extent, or quality of habitat, and severe fragmentation of occurrences; (3) small population size with continued declines; (4) very small population size; and (5) analysis showing the probability of extinction in the wild is at least 50 percent within 10 years or three generations.
In the FESA, Congress defined an "endangered species" as "any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range..." The California Endangered Species Act (CESA) contains a similar definition. In CESA, the California legislature defined an "endangered species" as a native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant, which is in serious danger of becoming extinct throughout all, or a significant portion, of its range due to one or more causes (California Fish and Game Code § 2062). Given the information on the status of the Mojave desert tortoise and the definition of an endangered species, The Desert Tortoise Conservancy believes the status of the Mojave desert tortoise is that it is an endangered species.
The IUCN places a taxon in the Critically Endangered category when the best available evidence indicates that it meets one or more of the criteria for Critically Endangered. These criteria are (1) population decline - a substantial (>80 percent) reduction in population size in the last 10 years; (2) geographic decline - a substantial reduction in extent of occurrence, area of occupancy, area/extent, or quality of habitat, and severe fragmentation of occurrences; (3) small population size with continued declines; (4) very small population size; and (5) analysis showing the probability of extinction in the wild is at least 50 percent within 10 years or three generations.
In the FESA, Congress defined an "endangered species" as "any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range..." The California Endangered Species Act (CESA) contains a similar definition. In CESA, the California legislature defined an "endangered species" as a native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant, which is in serious danger of becoming extinct throughout all, or a significant portion, of its range due to one or more causes (California Fish and Game Code § 2062). Given the information on the status of the Mojave desert tortoise and the definition of an endangered species, The Desert Tortoise Conservancy believes the status of the Mojave desert tortoise is that it is an endangered species.
Habitat restoration
In addition to supporting research to understand how invasive species affect desert tortoises, the Service is also working with other agencies to save the species by improving its habitat. The habitat restoration process is a two-pronged approach that includes herbicides and out-planting.
“We are looking to do some experimental restoration treatments that will help us learn how to restore desert tortoise habitats that are burned,” says Sara Scoles-Sciulla, plant ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.
There's much to see here. So, take your time, look around, and learn all there is to know about us. We hope you enjoy our site and take a moment to drop us a line. The first prong involves knocking back the grasses. With two treatment types, the herbicides are designed to protect against the invasive species of grass. First, a pre-emergent herbicide targets the grass before it has an opportunity to germinate from a seedling. Second, a post-emergent herbicide targets the plant once it has sprouted. The specialized treatments are designed to cease the reproduction of additional foreign grass and allow the ecosystem a window for native plants to grow back without the competition.
“[The herbicide is] non-selective,” says Maura Schumacher, biological science technician at the National Park Service. “Wind and rain will cause this herbicide to get to the non-target areas and kill non-target native desirable species. We're very careful with where the herbicide goes, when we're spraying it, what time of day … so we can preserve the native vegetation.”
However, since so much of the Mojave Desert has already burned, there are not enough native seeds left to take advantage of this window. This requires the scientists to apply additional remedies in the second prong of the restoration strategy. Scientists administer treatments like seeding and out-planting greenhouse-grown native species. The scientists also rely on desert rodents to help the process along by fertilizing and dropping the seeds all over the Mojave.
“Once [native shrubs] are back on the landscape, we think they will provide the shade, and they’ll provide the structure for tortoise burrows that are necessary to keep this endangered species going out here on the landscape,” says Jonathan Smith, restoration project manager at the Bureau of Land Management.
“We are looking to do some experimental restoration treatments that will help us learn how to restore desert tortoise habitats that are burned,” says Sara Scoles-Sciulla, plant ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.
There's much to see here. So, take your time, look around, and learn all there is to know about us. We hope you enjoy our site and take a moment to drop us a line. The first prong involves knocking back the grasses. With two treatment types, the herbicides are designed to protect against the invasive species of grass. First, a pre-emergent herbicide targets the grass before it has an opportunity to germinate from a seedling. Second, a post-emergent herbicide targets the plant once it has sprouted. The specialized treatments are designed to cease the reproduction of additional foreign grass and allow the ecosystem a window for native plants to grow back without the competition.
“[The herbicide is] non-selective,” says Maura Schumacher, biological science technician at the National Park Service. “Wind and rain will cause this herbicide to get to the non-target areas and kill non-target native desirable species. We're very careful with where the herbicide goes, when we're spraying it, what time of day … so we can preserve the native vegetation.”
However, since so much of the Mojave Desert has already burned, there are not enough native seeds left to take advantage of this window. This requires the scientists to apply additional remedies in the second prong of the restoration strategy. Scientists administer treatments like seeding and out-planting greenhouse-grown native species. The scientists also rely on desert rodents to help the process along by fertilizing and dropping the seeds all over the Mojave.
“Once [native shrubs] are back on the landscape, we think they will provide the shade, and they’ll provide the structure for tortoise burrows that are necessary to keep this endangered species going out here on the landscape,” says Jonathan Smith, restoration project manager at the Bureau of Land Management.
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Additional Ways to HelpThere are ways the public can help the desert tortoise. First, be extremely careful with sparks or fire in the desert to avoid causing a wildfire that can quickly get out of hand. If you see a desert tortoise, the most important thing you can do is not touch, harass or pick it up unless it immediately needs to be moved out of harm’s way.
While they might look friendly, approaching a tortoise might scare it and cause the reptile to empty its bladder, losing the liquid it needs to stay hydrated in its harsh climate. Another way to help the tortoise is to be cautious when traveling through its habitat: check under parked cars prior to ignition as tortoises might seek shade under cars; stay on marked paths while hiking to avoid disturbing its burrows, food or shelter; and drive slowly on designated routes to avoid crushing the tortoise. |
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In addition, desert tortoises have charismatic personalities which can entice people to pluck them from their natural habitat. Roy Averill-Murray advises people against taking tortoises they find home with them.
“It is really important that [people] do not collect tortoises from the wild; the population is too low and can’t sustain that,” he says.
Likewise, do not release pet tortoises because they can spread disease to wild tortoises.
The public can help the Service and its partners save the desert tortoise. Human activity caused the species population to decline, and human activity can bring it back.
“It is really important that [people] do not collect tortoises from the wild; the population is too low and can’t sustain that,” he says.
Likewise, do not release pet tortoises because they can spread disease to wild tortoises.
The public can help the Service and its partners save the desert tortoise. Human activity caused the species population to decline, and human activity can bring it back.