Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Desert Tortoises in the News

Research on desert tortoises has received some press in Popular Science and the LA Times. SBSC scientists and their collaborators have been studying the influence of a wind turbine facility on potential predators of the tortoises and on the effects of drought on tortoises near Joshua Tree National Park.

Popular Science

Jeff Lovich from the SBSC was interviewed by Popular Science about his recently published work regarding the effects a wind turbine facility had on potential predators of desert tortoises. The link to the Popular Science piece, titled "Desert critters avoid noisy wind farm turbines," is here: https://www.popsci.com/wind-farm-predators/. The link to Jeff’s recently published paper, "Mammalian mesocarnivore visitation at tortoise burrows in a wind farm," is: https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21262.

Los Angeles Times

A Los Angeles Times article was published about Jeff Lovich’s research on the effects of drought on desert tortoises near Joshua Tree National Park. Jeff Lovich was quoted in the article, as was Kristen Lalumiere (Joshua Tree National Park) and Debra Hughson (Mojave National Preserve). The title of the article is, “An ‘evolutionary gamble’ may be killing Joshua Tree’s mother tortoises,” and the link to the article is here: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-tortoise-survival-20170515-story.html.

A female Agassiz's desert tortoise at Joshua Tree National Park
A female Agassiz's desert tortoise at Joshua Tree National Park lounges in the entrance of her burrow, wearing a USGS radio.(Credit: Shellie Puffer, USGS. Public domain.)

Get Our News

These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.