Sahara Desert

The fennec fox (Vulpes zerda) is a small fox native to the deserts of North Africa, ranging from Western Sahara and Mauritania to the Sinai Peninsula.

"The Sahara is not advancing, but fluctuating like waves on the ocean," says researcher Stefanie Herrmann from the Office of Arid Land Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "There is no extensive desertification," Prince agrees.

The leopard's range in West Africa is estimated to have declined by 95%, and in the Sahara desert by 97%.

During quiet periods, called recessions, desert locusts are confined to a 16-million-square-kilometre (6.2-million-square-mile) belt that extends from Mauritania through the Sahara Desert in northern Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula, and into northwest India.

Its range covers a wide sweep of territory in the Sahara, Arabian Desert, Thar Desert, and Central Asia, from Algeria and Mali in the west through to Egypt, Ethiopia, Asia Minor and the Arabian Peninsula, eastwards to Kazakhstan and western India in the northeast and southeast.

Fat-tailed gerbils are native to the Northern Sahara (northwestern Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria).

Isolated populations are also present in some mountainous regions of the Sahara.

They will even live in the Sahara so long as an area has rocks, water, and some plant matter.

It is the most arid-adapted of hyrax species, and its range includes dry mountainous regions in the Namib, Sahara, and Arabian deserts.