Around Campus
news Protecting the Grasslands
Professor’s research in Mongolia aims to conserve environment, inform policy makers
E
MU’s Dr. Yichun Xie was invited to participate in a distinguished re- search project by the Chinese Acad-
emy of Sciences in 2004. Xie caught the bug, it seemed, and by the time the project was finished he had more questions than answers. He and several colleagues drafted a research proposal to NASA, and carved themselves an opportunity to spend four more years (2009-2012) on the project. Since then, the team has been map- ping and recording the differences in plant and soil life in two grassland areas of the Mongolian Plateau: the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China (IMAR) and the country of Mongolia.
The crew included researchers from
EMU, University of Michigan, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Mongolian Acad- emy of Sciences, and IMAR. Xie adds that the team also used research facilities and resources from several other countries, universities and institutions.
The group spent 2010 and 2011 travel- ing gathering plant and soil samples, creat- ing different kinds of maps using GIS and remote sensing technology, and testing and comparing the samples.
Xie says that due to growing areas of human population, grassland degradation is becoming a serious issue. Therefore, it is critical to understand the driving factors behind grassland degradation in order to conserve and possibly restore them. “If humans destroy the land, it’s hard to recover,” says Xie.
Another important goal of the study was to help policy makers understand how vegetation responds to social and environ- mental changes. As such, Xie and his team set out to question some ideas about the causes of grassland degradation.
Xie says that according to most pub- lished literature on the subject, degrada- tion is most prevalent in areas where there are noticeable climate changes or bad soil conditions, and are often a result of hu- man disturbance of the land or of animals “overgrazing.” Some of the team’s results were some- what different than earlier research had suggested. Firstly, their results didn’t il- lustrate that intensified animal grazing seemed to cause degradation of grass- lands, but Xie suggests that fencing some large areas for animal grazing may help slow degradation, as it would confine graz- ing to healthier areas of the grasslands. Second, degradation was more severe near roads built into the lands, but fol- lowed different trends near settlements. Xie suggests that better planning of road systems (for example, setting up in remote areas) will help protect grasslands and be more convenient for the community. The crew also observed some conserva- tion areas for vegetation on their trip, and recommended taking measures to protect vegetation near roads.
Xie says that the goal of the project is to contribute and develop as much scientific data on the topic as they can, and to in- form policymakers to help them make bet- ter use of the grasslands. Several members of the team have already published papers and projects for well-known scientific journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Land- scape Ecology, and ISPRS Journal of Photo- grammetry and Remote Sensing. For the future, Xie says more grant pro- posals are in the works for NASA and the
National Science Foundation. 3 — Leah Shutes
Professor Yichun Xie
6 Eastern | SUMMER 2013
Photographs by Randy Mascharka
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44