The Eastern Steppe Living Landscape

The Eastern Steppe of Mongolia is perhaps the world’s largest intact grassland ecosystem. This vast wilderness is home to one of the world’s last great spectacles of migrating ungulates, the Mongolian gazelle. Numerous other mammals live on the steppe, and there are many rare or critically threatened birds, including six species of cranes (almost half the world’s species). The WCS Living Landscapes Program strives to address threats to biodiversity and wild places through the implementation of a participatory, wildlife-based strategy for landscape conservation.

The Human Aspect
Human populations on the steppe have historically been sparsely distributed and engaged in traditional nomadic livestock production, which had minimal impact on the ecosystem. This historical pattern of sustainable use has been disrupted by major socio-economic changes. Rising urban unemployment has increased reliance on the hunting of wildlife for subsistence and income, while declining markets for meat and other livestock products have increased poverty among herders. The country’s economic needs are also driving oil, coal, gas and mineral exploitation of the Eastern Steppe. 

Threats
Threats to the Eastern Steppe landscape continue to be related to poor planning and management, and deficits in the resources necessary locally and nationally to enforce existing environmental regulations and wildlife protection laws. Oil and mineral exploitation is expanding in the Eastern Steppe with little consideration of the potential impacts on the wildlife populations and communities of nomadic pastoralists living in the area. There is also mounting evidence that poaching and illegal wildlife trade is decimating populations of fur bearers and large ungulates on the Eastern Steppe and across the nation.


The Landscape species suite, from top left: Mongolian gazelle, gray wolf, Ussurian moose*, Siberian marmot*, white-naped crane*, Asiatic grass frog, saker falcon*, taimen*

WCS Activities
Landscape Species Approach: Selected a suite of eight Landscape Species that represent the threats to biodiversity and the diverse habitats of the Eastern Steppe landscape. Conservation Landscapes for each of these species are built by overlaying their potential abundance and specific threats using GIS applications.

Important Bird Areas: Mapped the Important Bird Areas (IBAs) of the Eastern Steppe, including the locations and descriptions of an additional 21 proposed sites.
Wildlife Trade & Hunting: Initiated a data exchange project with the State Specialized Inspection Agency designed to identify “hot spots” of poaching and illegal wildlife trade on the Eastern Steppe.

Herder Community-Based Conservation: Co-hosted a workshop series with the Eastern Mongolian Community Conservation Association (EMCCA) designed to guide herder communities through the process of acquiring wildlife management and natural resource rights for their traditional grazing lands, and train volunteer rangers in wildlife monitoring and protection. This initiative has the potential of expanding the protected area network on the Eastern Steppe by 200,000 hectares through community-initiated wildlife protection and management.

Important Next Steps
The WCS Eastern Steppe project continues to develop and implement a landscape scale management planning process, using the WCS’s Landscape Species Approach, by collecting and interfacing information about biological requirements of species and the human-caused threats necessary to guide management strategies and actions at a broad scale. In the long term, the WCS Eastern Steppe program expects that our use of participatory initiatives for landscape conservation will produce a mosaic of wildlife-focused landscape-level conservation efforts initiated by the Ministry of Nature and Environment (Protected Area Administration), local governments, private enterprises and communities of livestock herders.  The Landscape Species Approach will unite the efforts of the diverse stakeholders on the Eastern Steppe and provide the guidance and tools necessary to implement more strategic and collaborative conservation interventions, monitoring and evaluation activities.

The program in Mongolia, “The Eastern Steppe Living Landscape: Sustaining Wildlife and Traditional Livelihoods in the Arid Grasslands of Mongolia,” is funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s GCPII program.