Omar Attum, B. Rabea, S. Osman, S. Habinan, Sherif Baha El Din , and Bruce A. Kingsbury

Conservationists are continually faced with the decision of how to allocate limited financial resources for conservation. The Egyptian tortoise, Testudo kleinmanni, is a globally endangered species. We have been taking a local community approach to Egyptian tortoise conservation in North Sinai, Egypt by employing local people as research technicians to monitor tortoises by following their tracks. In order to test the validity of this data for spatial ecology studies, we compared patterns of movement and activity for tortoises located by resident community research technician through either tracking or radiotelemetry. If there are no significant differences between methods in interpreting tortoise spatial ecology, we suggest money spent on expensive equipment should be used instead to hire local community research technicians. such approaches have multiple conservation benefits beyond ecological discovery, such as improving community relations around protected areas and discouraging tortoise collection. Graduate Research Oral

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