Using balance of seasonal herbage supply and demand to inform sustainable grassland management on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

To mitigate the impacts of grassland degradation on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP), in recent decades China has been implementing large-scale conservation programs and has invested about 42 billion CNY (7 billion USD). However, these programs are faced with major challenges involving trade-offs between ecological function, livestock production and income of pastoralists. Scientific assessments, as well as technical and policy issues, have not fully captured the complex ecological, social and economic dynamics of the challenges facing grassland management on the QTP. Pastoral livestock production on the QTP is characterized by imbalance in both quality and quantity between livestock seasonal nutrient requirements and herbage production, which forces pastoralists to keep larger numbers of livestock for longer periods, leading to overgrazing. To solve these problems, an integrated crop-livestock system is promoted to improve the efficiency of livestock production and conserve natural grassland as well for a sustainable system for the QTP.

Keywords

ecosystem function / grassland degradation / grassland management / integrated rangeland-cropland-livestock production system / Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program (2016YFC0501905) and the Science and Technology Service Network Initiative of Chinese Academy of Sciences (KFJ-STS-ZDTP-013).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Xinquan Zhao, Liang Zhao, Qi Li, Huai Chen, Huakun Zhou, Shixiao Xu, Quanmin Dong, Gaolin Wu, and Yixin He declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article is a review and does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)