Every winter, the temperature on the Hulunbuir meadow steppe, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, plunges far below freezing and herder families face a harsh calculation: how much hay do they have and how many animals can it feed until spring?
In a drought year, getting it wrong may lead to starving livestock and losing a year's income. What's worse, overgrazing can degrade the grassland, leaving even less grass for the livestock.
Xin Xiaoping, director of the Hulunbuir Grassland Ecosystem National Observation and Research Station of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has spent about three decades trying to give herders a better answer to that calculation.
She leads a team that is developing what amounts to a digital consultant for the steppe — a large-model question-and-answer system that integrates decades of data on the steppe with real-time information such as livestock prices, hay markets, and regional drought forecasts.
The system could vastly improve the fortunes of traditional herders on the steppe.
Her station, established in 1997, was designated a national station in 2005. It is among China's 167 national field stations covering ecosystems and geophysics. They support environmental protection and disaster prevention efforts. Field stations are nature's outposts sensing changes in the ecosystem.
A herder can ask it: "How many animals should I keep this year? Should I buy feed or sell stock?" The reply is specific and grounded in the environment of that exact patch of grassland.
"To give a better answer, we ran a series of research projects to study the grassland on its yield, nutrition and species composition. To find targeted restoration methods, we also need to figure out which types of degradation are caused by climate change, and which are due to overgrazing or long-term mowing," the 56-year-old said.
"Over a short time, climate change doesn't affect vegetation structure all that much. Those systems evolved over millions of years. But it does have a big impact on productivity, and that's where we now need to adjust our management approach to keep up with the pace of change," she added.
During a drought, grass yield is only one-third of that in a normal year. If rainfall is good in a given year, herders can graze more. But if it's very dry and grass growth is poor, heavy use will lead to degradation, she added.
