CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 42

in 2005). Sometime between 1997 and 2002, a small number of Mongol pastoralists again
began to live in Yeniugou year-round, building winter houses in the lower-elevation eastern
portions of the valley, moving westward in summer to temporary (but increasingly fixed)
higher-elevation pastures.
With the changes from Tibetan through Kazak to Mongol use rights, and from year-
round to mostly seasonal grazing, pastoralism in Yeniugou gradually became transformed
from a subsistence to a commercial activity. Kazaks had herded as family units, but by
the early 1990s children of Mongol herders were left to attend school at their wintering
areas, and only adult family members traveled with their sheep herds. By 2002, contract
herders were increasingly hired to supplement, or in some cases, replace herd owners.
The traditional Mongol ger , commonly seen in the early 1990s, had become rare by 1997
and was replaced entirely by canvas tents in 2002 and brick houses by 2005; horses and
camels had become increasingly replaced by tractors, motorcycles, and jeeps as means of
transportation. Range allocation, which in the early 1990s had been informal and variable,
with disputes adjudicated by the local team leader ( duizhang ), had by 2002 become fixed
by the livestock bureau, and boundaries among adjacent pastures, although unfenced,
were supposedly recognized and honored. 68
During surveys in 1991, 1992, and 1997, my colleagues and I noticed evidence of over-
use by livestock only in the immediate vicinity of encampments, betrayed by the presence
of bare ground and increases of unpalatable species such as Thermopsis lanceolata at the
expense of Stipa and other palatable grasses. As long as our observations were made more
than a few hundred meters from the sites of previous encampments, grasses and sedges
appeared to be thriving with little evidence of loss of vigor that could be attributed to
livestock. In 2002 and 2005, however, after a few years of more concentrated livestock
grazing within clearly delineated pastures, differences between grazed and ungrazed
areas had become increasingly apparent. Particularly in lower-elevation Stipa -dominated
valleys and benches, the vigor, height, and ground cover of Stipa had become noticeably
reduced not merely in close proximity to encampment sites, but within a radius of 2 to 3
kilometers. The total number of pastoralists using Yeniugou had not increased, but those
species most sensitive to grazing had begun declining, and portions of Yeniugou by 2002
seemed deserving of the description “degraded.”
Jianshe
The best rangeland and economic data of the four case studies came from Jianshe, not
only because we prioritized collecting them, but because our Kazak colleagues possessed
both scientific and cultural knowledge of the area. 69 In addition, we had the advantage
of being able to compare our results (mostly obtained during 1998-2000) directly with
those obtained by the county-level range-allocation survey, which had been conducted
during 1983-84. 70
Professor Liu Rongtong of Gansu Agricultural University had previously identified
grasslands within Jianshe as belonging to six different formations, and we used the same
categories (but described them as we found them in the year 2000). “Mountain desert