Abstract
Desertification and decreasing of vegetation in Southern Mongolia has been progressing due to unstable rainfall and disordered human activity. Unstable rainfall causes lowering of groundwater level and shortening water supply to native plants. Overgrazing of domestic animals such as goat, sheep, and horse also gives critical damage to rangeland. Numbers of domestic animals are increasing year by year, so that grazing pressure excesses over productivity of land.
Authors have been working on greening experiment for Licorice (Glycyrrhiza uralensis Fisch.) to establish countermeasures for combating desertification. We developed Greening Soil Material. It can be controlled moisture and nutrient retention capacity in shallow part of ground for growing plants healthily by only mixing local sand and dried animal manure and setting 10-30 cm depth in targeting ground.
GSM is made of sand and dried animal manure that can be taken around targeting ground. Sand can be taken around habitat of licorice and other vegetation. Dried animal manure is from domestic animals. It is ordinary kept for fuel in nomad’s house, however there is excessive portion which is discarded. GSM can utilize the excessive portion of dried animal manure as high water and nutrient retentive material. Therefore, it can be eco-material which can achieve low-cost and environmentally-friendly method.
A targeting plant, licorice, is one of the most valuable medicinal plants growing naturally in arid region, such as Mongolia and China. However, its distribution area is decreasing and productive resource had reduced to 1/7 for about 30 years due to above-mentioned human factor and climate change. Therefore, planting licorice by using GSM could be sustainable and high value-added greening which can be accomplished greening with cultivation.
In this paper, for clarifying key geo-environmental, setting and time factors of survival licorice, principal component analysis, multiple regression analysis and logistic regression analysis on several conditions were conducted. 15 types of experimental conditions such as volume of GSM per root, settings of root (vertical or horizontal), cultivation periods, initial water content, initial dry density, initial pH, initial electric conductivity, Initial calcium carbonate (CaCO3), and initial water soluble cations (Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, Na+) were used as explanatory variables. Moreover, survival rate was estimated by proposed formula using geo-environmental parameters of future greening area.
