The Desert Tortoise Council is excited to announce the 50th Annual Meeting and Symposium, which will be a hybrid event (both in-person and virtual attendance options) that will be held at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, from February 25-28, 2025. A field trip is scheduled the day before the meeting on February 24. The Symposium will include a plenary address, invited and featured speakers, and contributed papers and posters. As befits the 50th celebratory year, the program will be exciting, challenging, and full of new information! We are fortunate in 2025 to be located close to the four state boundaries and a backdrop of many ongoing research projects. The symposium will be full of papers on desert tortoises, effects of climate warming and drying, tortoise demography and connectivity of populations, human effects on habitats, and the latest techniques for surveys, and methods for evaluating finding of the tortoise species. Dr. William Rees from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver will speak on a critical topic, climate overshoot, a subject of concern to all of us. Dr. Rees recently published a paper in World. Dr. Kristina Drake and Corey Mitchell, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, are organizing a session on demographic techniques and findings. Head-starting and translocations will be another topic of interest. We are especially pleased to have speakers on the latest topics of interest for the Sonoran tortoise and Texas tortoises, as well as the latest on releases of head-started Bolson tortoises in the United States. We will share more details about plenary speakers and the program in early January. The program will be posted on the website 30 days prior to the Symposium.

 All room reservations must be made before the cutoff date of Friday, January 24, 2025 to receive the discounted group rate.  Please click the Hotel Reservations button below.

Late registration rates kick in after January 15th so register now!