The expedition starts on Sunday at 12:00 pm (afternoon) at St Katherine. To help volunteers to arrive on time, a bus will travel from Cairo to St. Katherine on Sunday morning, starting at 5:00 am. You will arrive to Fox camp, a Bedouin camp where you will stay for the first two days. The camp has all essential facilities (toilets, showers, kitchen, eating area, tents/rooms, etc…) but these are basic and unsophisticated. In the two days are there you will:

• be given a briefing on health, safety and comfort in desert conditions
• do a practice walk up Mt Sinai 
• visit the Monastery of St Catherine and the Visitor Center of the St Katherine Protectorate
• be given presentations about the research programme objectives and techniques

On Tuesday at 11:00 am, the whole group will move to a remote camp in the desert where a primitive camping site (a Bedouin tent) will be set up in advance of our arrival. A practice survey will be done in the late afternoon.
We will spend three nights in the desert, doing surveys every day in the early morning and late afternoon. You will join one of the survey teams for each survey period, with each team led by a researcher and focussed on a different taxonomic group for survey: plants, birds, mammals, bats, and reptiles & butterflies.
You will be sleeping out in the open air all the time. Sleeping bags and mats will be supplied if you don’t have them, but we would advice you to have your own.
Bedouin cooks will produce local food for us. There are basic toilet facilities. Jeeps or pickup trucks will take the survey teams to different wadis, and pick them up again afterwards to return to the campsite. All teams will have a Bedouin guide. The campsite will have a doctor in constant attendance in case of simple illness or injury; more serious cases will be taken by car to hospital.
We will move back to Fox camp on Saturday morning, where you will be briefed on how your work fits into the bigger plan and how important is it.
The expedition ends on Saturday at 3:00 pm, when the bus will leave from St. Katherine for Cairo (or for Dahab if you are taking the diving course).

If you join for two weeks, you will stay in the desert for four more days together with other volunteers, so that you will spend a total of nine days in your expedition, returning at the end to Fox camp. You will then be divided into groups, with each group working on how to put the data into the computer, and learning how to analyse them using various statistical programs (such as SPSS or Distance). Finally each group will present the results.

The main work of the Nature & Science Foundation in the marine environment is targeted at building capacity among Arab divers to undertake field research on coral reefs. This is done via a collaborative agreement between the University of Hull and the Foundation, aimed at training a number of Arab nationals to meet European Union standards to qualify as Scientific Divers. A course has been developed, and the training will be done by Operation Wallacea at the Nature & Science Foundation Dahab site.
The marine work is run from a Bedouin camp on the edge of the Gulf of Aqaba, near Dahab. There are open-sided tents with colourful carpets and low tables (called arishas in Arabic) where you can relax in the shade and drink tea in between dives and lectures. The camp has dive equipment and you can access the dive sites by just wading into the sea immediately in front of the camp. All food is prepared by the Bedouin team on site. Accommodation is in air-conditioned rooms with ensuite bathrooms at the nearby hotel, which has extensive grounds and swimming pools only approximately 400 m away along the beach.
Dive Training Courses. If you are doing a PADI Open Water course, you need to bring two passport-sized photos for each dive-training course you intend to undertake. You also need a logbook—a simple A5-sized hardback notebook will suffice, although you can buy PADI logbooks on-site. Already dive qualified? Dive qualifications and logbooks need to be brought with you if you are already a qualified diver.
Expeditions start from St Katherine 12:00 on Sunday and finish in Dahab at 08:00 on the following Saturday. The Nature & Science Foundation, will organize transport for you to Dahab and your return to Cairo.

A second joint OpWall/NSF survey is being started in 2010 in the remote and huge Western Desert, that lies west of the Nile and stretches south to the border with Sudan and west to Libya. Underneath this vast desert area lies a great deal of water, sometimes as close as 2 m from the surface. The Egyptian Government is planning to use this water in irrigation, to green the desert and provide a major source of food for the country. However, the desert contains some unique species and unique areas, such as the White Desert Protected Area. We are mounting an initial 2-week expedition to survey the biodiversity of oases in the White Desert area from Baharia to Farafra. This 'fishing in the desert' project includes surveys of the fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals of a series of remote oases, as well as surveys of their importance as staging posts for migrant birds.
The Western Desert surveys will operate from Bedouin camps set up beside lakes at Baharia and Farafra. Volunteers will stay in colourful Bedouin tents and will have vehicles available to access the other oases in the area. Food will be prepared by teams of Bedouin, and there will be field toilets and shower facilities. Large shaded areas will be set up for the mid-day period when it is too hot to work: the cool still waters of the lakes will provide a major attraction at this time of day!
Transfers between sites will use minibuses. From Fox Camp, teams working on the atlassing surveys will use 4-wheel-drive vehicles: journey times will vary according to the square being surveyed.The journey time from St Katherine to Dahab is about three hours, taking you through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in Egypt.
If you are interested in joining the Western Desert surveys, these will start from Baharia Oasis at 12:00 noon on Sunday 22 August, and finish at Baharia at 12:00 noon on Saturday 04 September.

These estimate the coverage of wadis with plants, external factors affecting plant distributions, and plant overall health; over time, they will estimate changes in coverage over the years.
The quadrat/transect method is the most suitable for plant surveys. In these, a 25-m rope (the transect) is placed in a randomly chosen part in the most vegetated area of the wadi, and five 5x5-m squares (quadrats) placed alternately on either side of the transect.
In each quadrate, the following are recorded:

• all the species are identified
• the number of individuals of each species are counted
• the dimensions of a maximum of five individuals are measured
• the fruits and flowers of each individual plant are estimated
• a measure of grazing pressure on each individual is noted
• the presence or absence of vehicle tracks is noted

The quantity of droppings of target species of wild animals (ibex, gazelle, fox, hare, hyrax, dog, agama lizards) are assessed: an identification guide to these will be provided. The dung of domestic animals (camels, goats, donkeys) are recorded on a four-point scale (none, low [<10], average [10-30], high [30-100], very high [>100]), recording old and fresh droppings separately. Some fresh droppings from each transect are collected in vials with preservative

These teams will leave with one Bedouin guide either at dawn (bird team) or an hour ro so later (reptile/butterfly team). They will move slowly down the wadi at about 1 km per hour, surveying birds and reptiles/butterflies as they go. They record a standard set of information with each individual seen: date, time, wadi, GPS reading of position and altitude, species involved, estimated distance and bearing of the sighting, number of individuals, notes on activity (especially direction of flight if migrating). The team leader will help you to identify every animal that you see, using identification guides provided. During the heat of the day, you will rest in the shade and take lunch, and while resting, you will keep a lookout for birds and reptiles, and record them as before. In the late afternoon you will perform another transect. As dusk falls, you will play tapes of two owl species (Eagle Owl, Hume’s Tawny Owl) for one hour and note how many replies you receive.

As a result of our work, bats are now quite well recorded in the St Katherine Protectorate, but many squares are still unvisited. You will not be allowed to handle bats unless you have had a rabies immunisation, but the bat expert leading the teams may allow you to touch and photograph them. The echolocation calls of free-living bats will be recorded digitally. Bats will also be trapped using mistnets, identified, measured and released so that their echolocation calls can be recorded digitally as they fly away. We now have an extensive call library of these echolocation calls, enabling us to identify most species without capture.