Tengger Desert
The Tengger Desert, the fourth-largest desert in China, spans approximately 15,444 square miles (40,000 square kilometers) primarily across the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Ningxia Province. This desert features unique singing sand dunes that produce sound due to wind and movement, adding to its distinctive landscape. The Shapotou area within the desert is home to the Shapotou Desert Experimental Research Station, which focuses on stabilizing sand dunes through the use of microbial mats and vegetation, ultimately contributing to agricultural efforts amid food shortages in China.
A significant environmental initiative began in 2010 to create a greenbelt intended to prevent the merging of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts, involving the planting of vegetation over a 126-mile stretch. This effort aims to combat the effects of human activity and climate change on the desert ecosystem. The fauna of the Tengger Desert includes various species such as antelope, wild horses, and the endangered golden snub-nosed monkey, which could benefit from forest restoration. As such efforts continue, the balance of this unique desert ecosystem remains a critical focus for conservation and sustainability.
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Subject Terms
Tengger Desert
Category: Desert Biomes.
Geographic Location: Asia.
Summary: This large desert has been partially revegetated in an effort to stabilize its sand dunes and prevent land degradation.
The fourth-largest desert in China, the Tengger Desert covers about 15,444 square miles (40,000 square kilometers), most of which lies in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and the Shapotou District of Zhongwei, Ningxia Province. The southern region of the Tengger Desert is sometimes called the Shapotou Desert. Shapotou is the site of the Shapotou Desert Experimental Research Station (SDERS), on the banks of the Yellow River on the south edge of the Tengger’s dune sea, where research focuses principally on the use of microbial mats and grasses to stabilize the dunes.
The SDERS’s work in the past has led to former sand dunes being used to grow fruit and vine crops, to help with China’s recurring food shortages. The trans-Asian Baotou-Lanzhou, or Baolan, railway also depends on the stabilization of sand dunes in the Tengger, in order to prevent its repeated burial. The Baolan railway is nearly 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) long, connecting Inner Mongolia to China’s Fansu province. It is the first Chinese railway built through deserts, and an important east-west connection, operating since the 1950s thanks to the work of the SDERS.
The Tengger Desert is home to singing sand dunes. Shear stress, caused by wind passing along the dunes, or by people walking or riding camels over the dunes, results in sounds of either high or low frequency; the alternation between the two notes sounds like tuneless singing.
In 2010, China began a project to plant a greenbelt between two deserts for the first time in Chinese history; the goal is to prevent the spread of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts into one another. The project, which had an initial completion date of 2015, consisted of planting vegetation between the two deserts along a 126-mile (202-kilometer) stretch ranging from 3 to 9 miles (5 to 15 kilometers) wide. The greenbelt was to replace a bush forest that once stood between the two deserts, which has been reduced to half its size since 1960 caused principally by human activity, particularly deforestation to create pasture land.
By the late-2010s, communities near the desert had restored 378,664 acres (153,240 hectares) of forest land, raising its forest coverage to almost 18 percent, up from 11.5 percent in 2010. Although the project initially stopped the deserts from merging, climate change remains a serious concern. Without continued forestation efforts, the Tengger will eventually merge with other nearby deserts. In response, the Chinese government had plans to build a “Green Great Wall,” planting 88 million acres (36 million hectares) of trees along a 3,000-mile (4,828-kilometer) path by 2050.
Vegetation
Much of the vegetation in the greenbelt will be the same as or similar to the vegetation used to stabilize dunes for crop growing or to keep the Baolan railway working. Revegetation is key to stabilizing the dunes, because of the positive correlation between the fractal dimension of soil particle size and the clay content of the shallow soil profile in the desert shrub ecosystem; the longer a dune is stabilized, the greater the soil clay content is. Revegetating develops soil structure better and increases that clay content. The sand-binding vegetation used by the SDERS to stabilize the dunes around the railway includes Caragana korshinskii, Hedysarum scoparium, and Artemisia ordosica, all dwarf desert shrubs existing in an ecosystem with a microbiotic soil crust cover atop the dunes. The stabilization efforts result in decreased soil particle size and increased subsoil layer thickness, microbiotic crust thickness, and volumetric soil moisture.
The richness of species in revegetated areas has been found to correlate positively with soil alkalinity balance and the concentration of carbon and nitrogen in the soil. Such revegetation has also restored cryptogamic diversity to the desert. Cryptogams are plants that propagate by spores, such as algaes, mosses, and lichens. In the Tengger Desert’s case, no lichens have been observed, but 24 species of algae and five mosses have been established since the SDERS’s revegetation efforts began.
Fauna
Animals in the region include the antelope, wild horse, wild camel, and ostrich, as well as the endangered golden-haired monkey or golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana), which is endemic (found only here) to the Tengger Desert and surrounding forests. It feeds primarily on lichen and has been found in colder temperatures (such as the Tengger in winter) than any other nonhuman primate species. The monkey is organized in packs ranging from small social groups of fewer than a dozen individuals to bands of hundreds; the social organization is obscure and complex. The planting of the green belt may assist with mitigating the monkey’s endangered status in the face of widespread habitat loss.
Bibliography
Beiser, Vince. “China’s Crazy Plan to Keep Sand From Swallowing the World.” Mother Jones, September/October 2017, www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/china-plants-billions-of-trees-in-the-desert/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2022.
Choo, Jenny. “Halting the Desert.” United Nations Association–UK, 9 Nov. 2018, www.climate2020.org.uk/halting-the-desert/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2022.
Li, Xin-Rong, Hong-Lang Xiao, Jing-Guang Zhang, and Xin-Ping Wang. “Long-Term Ecosystem Effects of Sand-Binding Vegetation in the Tengger Desert, Northern China.” Restoration Ecology 12, no. 3 (2004).
Li, Xin-Rong, H.-Y. Zhou, X.-P. Wang, Y.-G. Zhu, and P. J. O’Conner. “The Effects of Sand Stabilization and Revegetation on Cryptogam Diversity and Soil Fertility in the Tengger Desert, Northern China.” Plant and Soil 251, no. 2 (2003).
Wang, Xin-Ping, Xin-Rong Li, Hong-Lang Xiao, and Yan-Xia Pan. “Evolutionary Characteristics of the Artificially Revegetated Shrub Ecosystem in the Tengger Desert, Northern China.” Ecological Research 21, no. 3 (2006).