Dr. Alaaeldin Soultan

Desert biodiversity: conservation and biogeography

It is evident that world biodiversity is declining at rates that are unprecedented. While the vertebrate species are being lost at rates 100–1000 times greater than those in evolutionary history, the global change is expected to accelerate extinction rates further. While the conservation efforts have been focused on hotspots, the world's largest tropical Desert,  the Sahara -largest warm Desert in the world- together with the arid Sahel are being oversighted and neglected due to remoteness and long-term political instability. These provoke my interest in Desert ecosystem conservation, where my objective is to apply the modern ecological modelling approaches to: 1) identify the desert biodiversity hostspots, 2) study the spatial and temporal response of the desert fauna to the global change, 3) identify the desert biogeographic regions, 4) assess the conservation status of desert fauna, and 5) evaluate the effectiveness of the already established protected areas for conserving  the Desert biodiversity.