Dryland belt of Northern Eurasia: contemporary environmental changes and their consequences

Abstract

The dryland belt (DLB) in Northern Eurasia is the largest contiguous dryland on Earth. During the last century, changes here have included land use change (e.g. expansion of croplands and cities), resource extraction (e.g. coal, ores, oil, and gas), rapid institutional shifts (e.g. collapse of the Soviet Union), climatic changes, and natural disturbances (e.g. wildfires, floods, and dust storms). These factors intertwine, overlap, and sometimes mitigate, but can sometimes feedback upon each other to exacerbate their synergistic and cumulative effects. Thus, it is important to properly document each of these external and internal factors and to characterize the structural relationships among them in order to develop better approaches to alleviating negative consequences of these regional environmental changes. This paper addresses the climatic changes observed over the DLB in recent decades and outlines possible links of these changes (both impacts and feedback) with other external and internal factors of contemporary regional environmental changes and human activities within the DLB.

Biogeography of global drylands

“…This region also had an important role in the diversification of the families of halophytic succulents such as Chenopodioidea and Zygophyllaceae (Wu et al, 2018). The dryland belt of northern Eurasia, the largest continuous set of drylands in the world, encompasses from the Great Hungarian Plain (Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and Romania) to the Manchurian mixed forests in northeastern China (Groisman et al, 2018). Its hyperarid areas are the contiguous Taklimakan Desert, Qaidam Basin semidesert, and Alashan Plateau semidesert in northwestern China.…”

Climate Change Dominated Long‐Term Soil Carbon Losses of Inner Mongolian Grasslands

“…In recent decades the grasslands have experienced a spatially and temporally variable climate (Figures 1c and 1d) (Gutman et al, 2020;John et al, 2018;Lu et al, 2009), as well as various types/ intensities of land uses, such as land conversion and grazing (John et al, 2016(John et al, , 2018. Over the past half century, annual mean temperatures increased by 0.8-2.3°C throughout the Mongolian Plateau, while annual rainfall amounts in the region have decreased since 1998 (Groisman et al, 2017(Groisman et al, , 2018Li & Wang, 2012;Liu et al, 2014;Lu et al, 2009). Meanwhile, human activities have been escalating.…”

“…Additionally, the spatiotemporal changes of SOC, as well as the underlying mechanisms and feedbacks to climate, are jointly affected by the changing climate (Maia et al, 2019; Schimel et al, 1994; Scurlock & Hall, 1998) and human activities (Chen et al, 2018; Derner et al, 2018; Larreguy et al, 2014; McSherry & Ritchie, 2013)—a research frontier in global climate change (Booker et al, 2013). Accurate estimation of SOC in grassland soils thus far is mostly based on modeling and experimental approaches that carry extremely high uncertainties at regional scale and over long‐term periods (Groisman et al, 2018). A recent meta‐analysis reported that increases in SOC content free from land‐use changes accounts 48.1% of the studies (L. Chen et al, 2015).…”

Assessing landscape potential for human sustainability and ‘attractiveness’ across Asian Russia in a warmer 21st century

“…For half a century, from 1961 to 2010, climates in Siberia have been warming to varying degrees and in some regions more than predicted ( According to the twenty GCM climate ensemble results, climate will become milder and warmer across Asian Russia by the 2080 s particularly in the winter. Asian Russia will not be water limited in a warmer climate, except in some areas in the extreme south (Groisman et al 2018). In the 1990s, there were broad discussions in Russia on transferring Siberian river runoff to Central Asia.…”