THE EASTERN STEPPE’S LIVING LANDSCAPE

• Main Authors: Ochirkhuyag Lkhamjav, Amanda Fine, Karl Didier, Eric Sanderson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: permafrost; Siberia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.158.7847; http://www.isprs.org/congresses/beijing2008/proceedings/4_pdf/102.pdf

Mongolia, with a territory of 1.6 million square kilometers, lies at 42o-52o N between the boreal forests of Siberia and the Gobi desert, and spans the southernmost border of the permafrost and the northernmost deserts of Central Asia. The Eastern Steppe of Mongolia is perhaps the world’s largest intact grassland ecosystem. Treeless flat plains, rolling hills and a surprising amount of important wetlands characterize the Eastern Steppe. The Eastern Steppe is home to one of the world’s last great spectacles of migrating ungulates, the Mongolian gazelle (Procapra gutturosa), that was estimated in the 2005 at a population of 1.2 million based on surveys performed by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Numerous other unique mammals live on the steppe, and there are many rare or critically threatened birds, including six species of cranes (almost half the world’s species). The Eastern Steppe is also one the most important habitats in eastern Asia for migratory birds. The WCS Living Landscapes Program strives to conserve the valuable biodiversity, ecosystem service, and functional integrity of large wild places, including the Eastern Steppe, through the implementation of a participatory, wildlife-based strategy for landscape conservation. This approach, called the Landscape Species Approach, is designed to identify and map the needs of a representative suite of focal species (e.g., the Mongolian gazelle), across both political and ecological borders. We also identify and map the human activities which have the largest impacts on the ecosystem. By overlaying the needs of species and human activities, we are able to identify key conflicts (e.g., livestock competing with gazelle) and prioritize conservation resources to help resolve them.