Management of Social-Ecological Grazing Systems in the Altai Mountain Transboundary Zone.


Principal Investigator: Giorgos Mountrakis
How broad - scale factors impinge on local decision making and translate into land use change is not well understood. This is particularly true of the vast rangelands of the Altai Mountains in central Asia where grazing was and remains the dominant form of agriculture and land use. Critical questions remain about what communities, donors, and policymakers can do to promote desirable co - management outcomes in grazing systems of this ecologically similar region but politically complex region which remains in upheaval following the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the heavy subsidies it once provided to herding societies.

Our study takes a nested approach that first contrasts long - term, broad - scale vegetation dynamics for the same high montane grasslands occupied by Kazakh peoples herding livestock across four countries with strikingly different political systems Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan and China (regional modeling). We integrate remotely sensed data on recent LCLUC with semi - structured interviews of local herders at the local level among grazing areas in a transboundary region shared between Mongolia and Russia along the Sailyugem Range (local modeling). Our findings suggest that: i) using data from our field survey there is a strong correlation of MODIS NDVI values with ground vegetation cover, ii) there are clear linkages between traditional ecological knowledge on forage quality, as expressed via herder interviews, and satellite observations. Our work has also concentrated on LCLUC classification advancements. We have developed a method for per-pixel accuracy estimation for classification products and have investigated the effects of landscape heterogeneity on classification accuracy.

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