Creating new grasslands from saline deserts

New grasslands from deserts (from South China Morning Post)

The news is replete with stories about how grasslands are being destroyed through misplaced afforestation efforts, or through development into agricultural land and suburbs, so this news caught my eye.

At a time when climate change and population growth have hastened the impetus to secure food supplies, countries are always looking into how to turn unused land into one which can produce food. This includes areas that cannot support vegetation and crops due to higher saline content. The sodium and chloride in salt can cause damage to plants via various mechanisms. For example, the ions can prevent water absorption at the roots and cause wilting and drying.

Research to increase the ability of plants to tolerate higher salt concentrations is one way to address such problem areas, but the other way that some countries have explored is to actually modify the characteristics of the soil to decrease the salinity and make it tolerable for some plants.

Distichlis spicata, a salt tolerant species in the USA

This was the path taken by Tashkurgan Tajik county in China’s Xinjian province, where the government transformed 1300 ha of salty land over eight years into land that can support vegetation. They did this by lowering the pH of the soil from 9.5 to around 8 using chemical agents and halophilic bacteria.

The result is vegetation coverage of 85% and a land that yields up to 4500 kg of forage per hectare. In addition, the project also included upgrades to the irrigation infrastructure, eco-restoration, and innovative “dry seeding, wet germination” techniques to maximize irrigation effectiveness.

This large scale project was not the first of its kind, with Tangshan in Hebei province also having successfully converted its own saline land in 2022, so expect more new grasslands to sprout up from previously unusable land as governments scramble to shore up their food resources.

Unfortunately, the question on whether these activities have destroyed natural ecological communities in the original arid and saline areas was not addressed in the news article I read.

Source:

China’s idyllic Xinjiang grasslands hid a salty soiled secret that’s been solved. South China Morning Post. Oct 28, 2024.

2 responses to “Creating new grasslands from saline deserts”

  1. Amy Avatar
    Amy

    I suppose long term studies on the ecological impact were not done at all.

    1. Harry Avatar
      Harry

      I have to admit, I did not see any information on that, and if there was one I’m thinking it’ll be in Chinese. I wouldn’t think there would be much diversity in an arid, high salt soil though.

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