Conservation & Recovery
Conservation & Recovery Overview
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the Desert Tortoise Recovery Office in 2005 as a centralized entity to coordinate the four-state recovery effort.
A Recovery Plan for the Mojave Desert Tortoise describes an approach to reversing tortoise population declines through a coordinated effort of science-based implementation and evaluation of conservation actions. The Plan recognizes the need to adjust to the accelerating pace of environmental change and its impact on key resource management issues, such as corridors and connectivity. The Plan is a living document that advances a natural resource management model where ongoing detection of changes and attribution of causes will provide the basic information on whether or not the desert tortoise, or its ecosystem, is changing beyond natural variability. By continuous examination of vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of the desert tortoise to environmental change, resource managers will be able to update the Plan as it is being implemented with conservation measures that will help the desert tortoise recover.
It is the responsibility of the Recovery Office to:
- Coordinate cross-jurisdictional effort of science-based implementation and evaluation of priority conservation actions (see RITs)
- Gather, synthesize, interpret, and disseminate information to ensure that scientifically sound decisions are made
- Facilitate research to inform the recovery effort
- Monitor population and habitat responses over time (see Range-wide Monitoring)
The Recovery Office is dedicated to work with our partners in any way we can to reverse population declines and recover the Mojave Desert Tortoise.