Introduction 

The Nature and Science Foundation who are the Operation Wallacea partners in Egypt have been collating all the biodiversity records for Egypt as part of a nationwide BioMap project. Records have been collated from naturalists, travelers records, academic studies, museums etc and distributional maps created for a rage of taxa.  This study has revealed a number of gaps in survey information, which the Operation Wallacea teams are helping to fill.  Additional data in particular needs gathering from the southern Sinai mountains.  The whole region has been covered in a grid of 10km x 10km squares and standard surveying effort is being applied in each of these squares for a range of taxa.  By the end of 2007 over 30% of the squares had been surveyed.  In 2010 the Operation Wallacea teams are completing a 9 day trek from the Gulf of Suez to the St Katherine Protectorate and will be completing data gathering in a number of the missing squares. The teams will be camping out in the desert and will be split into groups specialising in Plants and Mammals or Birds and Reptiles.

The Plant and Mammal group will be gathering data on a target list of important plant species, and as well as completing an assessment of the usage of these areas by some of the larger mammal species. The group will start out from the desert camp shortly after dawn and over the period until 12 noon (when it will become too hot for active survey work) will complete two randomly positioned 25 m transects. After completing the transects the group will have lunch and rest in the shade, organizing the data until about 4 pm when the group has about two hours to move to the next campsite, a maximum of 5 km away. 

For each transect, a random GPS position will define a 15-m starting line from which five 25-m lines will extend down the wadi, 3 metres apart in parallel.  Each person will survey every square metre along one of these lines using a 1-m² quadrat, recording for each quadrat separately the following information:

• the overall plant cover by eye in units of 10%
• the total number of individual plants
• the number of individual plants of target species
• for each individual plant of the target species: height, two widths at right angle, number of flowers and number of fruits.
• the number of piles or individual droppings of target species of wild and domestic animals, recording dung age separately. Some fresh droppings from each transect should be collected in vials with preservative.
• signs of vehicle tracks (present, absent)
• the presence of insects on plants and the plant with which they are associated.

The Bird and Reptile part of the group will leave at dawn with a Bedouin guide. They will move slowly down the wadi at about 1 km per hour surveying birds, reptiles and butterflies as they go. This consists of recording a standard set of information from each sighting:

• date, time, wadi
• GPS reading of the position and altitude of the observer at the moment of first seeing the species
• species involved, and the number of individuals
• estimated distance of the sighting from the observer, and its bearing relative to the direction of the walk
• notes on activity (especially direction of flight if migrating)

The group leader will help to identify every bird seen, and members will also record a target list of key reptile and butterfly taxa.

At the camp site mist nets for bats will be run for 4 - 5 hours each night to obtain data on the bat fauna of these remote wadis.

   
 
Quadrat survey team - Dr Samy Zalat

Staffing for the programme 

Dr Samy Zalat, Head of Biomap the biodiversity mapping directorate that forms part of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency is the senior scientist on site and will be leading the research in St Katherine. The desert survey teams are organised by Farag Fox and a Bedouin logistics team. Heitham Zalat and Karim Zalat are organising the logistics for the Desert and marine sides respectively. Dr Francis Gilbert from Nottingham University leads the biodiversity atlas surveys.