Permafrost ecosystems entangled with human life in Mongolia-evaluating the impact of land use change in a warming climate

Mongolia is a democratic country in Central Asia, located between the endless forests of Siberia to the North and the Gobi desert to the South. However, another largely invisible boundary runs straight across Mongolia: the boundary between permafrost and permafrost-free areas.

In the Permafrost4Life project, we will investigate how permafrost is entangled with ecosystems and the traditional herder lifestyle that is an important element of the Mongolian society. In the permafrost-dominated regions, the density of livestock is by far highest due to more abundant water sources and more productive ecosystems. However, the exact role of the permafrost is not entirely clear which raises concerns in the context of climate change which leads permafrost to warm and disappear at an alarming rate. Permafrost can for example provide water from melting ground ice in the dry summer season, but it can also preventing rainwater from infiltrating deep in the ground so that it remains accessible for plants.

In Permafrost4Life, we work closely with Mongolian researchers to find out more about the function of permafrost in the “ecological wall against desertification” and to what extent this wall could become vulnerable in the future. For this purpose, we will combine field experiments and remote sensing to develop new numerical ecosystem models which can represent both the permafrost and human land use, in particular grazing and forestry.

Permafrost4Life is a unique collaboration between Mongolian and Norwegian research institutions, which is strongly connected to the local population that will experience the impacts of climate change in the future. Our goal is to make the new knowledge created in the project available to improve policy-making and land use management in both Mongolia and Central Asia.