Pasture Productivity Changes In Mongolia

Pasture Productivity Changes In Mongolia

Erdenetuya Magsar,
Remote Sensing specialist
National Remote Sensing Center, Namhem
Juulchny Str – 5, Meteorological Bldg.
Ulaanbaatar 210646, Mongolia
Tel: 976-11-329984(o), 976-99140523(mobile),
Fax: 976-11-329968
E-mail: m_erdenetuya@yahoo.com

Introduction
Mongolia, with its nomadic animal husbandry or livestock farming is one of the most dependent countries on nature and climate condition. Today the number of livestock reached 26 millions a head and the pastureland occupies more than 80 per cent of the territory, which is main source for animal grazing for whole year, as forage.

Geographical position and associated climatic influences can be a negative environmental condition that affects sustainable use of land resources, especially pastoral livestock production. Vegetation condition of the country is sensitively changes upon climate change and human impacts. Within last 60 years data the annual air temperature has increased in 1.66 degrees in average and the total precipitation amount had almost no change.

Different kinds of natural hazard such as drought, flood, heavy winter (zud), land degradation, desertification, strong wind/sand storm, and steppe and forest fires, which are related with global warming in someway, have major influences on pasture condition. Increased interest to use natural resources is also affecting ecosystem condition of pastureland of the country.

The main goal of this work is to assess vegetation cover change within last 20 years with pasture condition, estimated by NOAA/NDVI 10 days composite 8 km resolution data from January 1982 to September 2001, provided from NOAA/NASA Pathfinder data set. Also we tried to integrate NDVI data with observed and simulated biomass data.

Data And Methods

Satellite data
To monitor the pasture vegetation coverage of whole territory of Mongolia used the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data derived from NOAA/AVHRR data. The NDVI dataset is unique in that it is global, multi seasonal, multi annual, and multi spectral. These features are useful for environmental studies, particularly for the pasture monitoring of the country, where are large pasture and pastoral animal husbandry, which dependent on natural conditions. In this study we have used 10 days composite NOAA/NDVI 8 km resolution data from 1982 to 2001.

Pasture analyze data
Pasture plant biomass data measured at the meteorological/agro-meteorological stations and biomass data simulated by CENTURY model, are used to estimate pasture productivity for whole country. We have analyzed 40 years data of more than 60 stations and defined average biomass of different ecosystems.

In this study we have tried to establish integration of remotely sensed data with ground observation data and calculate their correlation.

The main purpose of the study was:

to estimate climate change trend within last 60 years
to analyse the start and end of growing season by observation data
to use modeling for pasture plant productivity
to monitor pasture vegetation growth by satellite data
to analyse pasture observation data
to integrate simulated data, derived from model with pasture observation and satellite data

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