Projects
California’s Desert Tortoise
As human activities in the desert increase, habitat for California’s desert tortoise decreases.
A regional conservation education effort, based at The Living Desert, aims to increase awareness of the wild desert tortoise by educating people about responsible use of the desert.
The project supports the Mojave Maxine Emergence Contest, which is a student education challenge to predict when The Living Desert’s famous desert tortoise will come out from hibernation.
Desert Pollinators
Human impacts contribute to the declining population of desert pollinators, which might also lead to a change in natural desert flora.
Funds collected here help both the Butterfly Conservation Initiative and the Urban Bee Project.
A component of this project looks specifically at The Living Desert’s native bees.
Saharan Ostrich
The Saharan Ostrich once inhabited 18 North African countries but now exists only in six.
Captive husbandry programs in the Sahara are underway to help preserve this critically endangered species.
Donations to this project will fund an initial release from the captive breeding center into the wild, which is expected in about two years.
African Lion
In the last sixty years, Africa has lost more than half of its lion population.
Conserving a large, free-ranging lion population along the Kenya-Tanzania borderlands will help rebuild lion prides.
This project is finding ways to avoid the human-lion conflict and create co-existence with pastoral livestock and lions while maintaining healthy prey numbers.
Mexican Wolf
The Mexican wolf is one of the rarest mammals in the world.
There are only about 50 Mexican wolves in a reintroduced population in the southwestern United States.
Cooperative efforts aim to facilitate the reintroduction of the Mexican wolves into the wild and provide livestock owners with the tools to successfully live with the wolves.
The Living Desert Herbarium
Climate change and human activities and are expected to change the composition of our desert flora.
The Living Desert Herbarium houses 578 specimens of native plant species.
The Living Desert plans to document the occurrence and preserve a specimen of every native plant currently on the 1,600 acres of natural desert it manages.
