The 11 papers in this document address issues and needs in the development and stewardship of Central Asia rangelands, and identify directions for future work. With its vast rangelands and numerous pastoral populations, Central Asia is a region of increasing importance to rangeland scientists, managers, and pastoral development specialists. Five of the papers address rangeland issues in Mongolia, three papers specifically address studies in China, two papers address Kazakhstan, and one paper addresses the use of satellite images for natural resource planning across Central Asia. These papers comprise the proceedings from a general technical conference at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society for Range Management, held at Salt Lake City, Utah, January 24-30, 2004. As the 2004 SRM Conference theme was “Rangelands in Transition,” these papers focus on an area of the world that has experienced dramatic socio-economic changes in 20th Century associated with adoption of communism and command economies and the subsequent collapse of the command economies and the recent transition to a free market economies. The changes in land use and land tenure policies that accompanied these shifts in socio economic regimes have had dramatic impacts on the region’s rangelands and the people who use them.
Articles include:
- Conserving biodiversity on Mongolian rangelands: Implications for protected area development and pastoral uses
- Pastoral community organization, livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in Mongolia’s southern Gobi region
- Land use and land tenure in Mongolia: A brief history and current issues
- Community based wildlife management planning in protected areas: The case of Altai argali in Mongolia
- Collection and evaluation of forage germplasm indigenous to Mongolia
- Rangeland, livestock and herders revisited in the northern pastoral region of China
- The paradox of the individual household responsibility system in the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau, China
- Providing winter bases for transhumant herders in Altai, Xinjiang China: Some consequences and lessons learned
- Fragmenting pastoral mobility: Changing grazing patterns in post-Soviet Kazakhstan
- Scaling-up of CO2 fluxes to assess carbon sequestration in rangelands of Central Asia
- A comparison of low cost satellite imagery for pastoral planning projects in Central Asia
