This paper focuses on the Mongolian plateau north of the Gobi Desert and discusses the process from the arrival of livestock to the beginning of nomadic pastoralism and the formation of horse-riding nomads based on archaeological data. Around 3000 BCE, the Afanasyevo culture of Central Asia arrived in the region from the Altai Mountains to the Khangai Mountains and introduced herding of sheep, goats and cattle. This group interbred with the local hunter-gatherers, and around 2500 BCE began a nomadic lifestyle with livestock. This is the first appearance of nomadism in the Mongolian plateau. Around 2000 BCE, nomadic pastoralism spread to the northwestern Mongolian plateau, which had turned into a steppe. Domesticated horses arrived around 1250 BCE. Horses were used to tow carts or chariots, but around 1000-900 BCE horse riding began to be seen, and horse-riding nomads were established.

Nomadic pastoralism as a subsistence in Mongolia is mainly determined by natural ecology in steppe. However, as pastoralists live in state and society, and so social elements also severely affect their practice of pastoralism. In modern age, political and economic changes such as socialization and democratization affected it, for instance. This article mainly discusses the infrastructures as an element affected by technology and social system. As an example of qualitative change which occurred in modern Mongolia, emergence of constructions such as buildings made of concrete by machines can be pointed out. Construction of infrastructure which started in late 50s by collective farms brought about a new style of space usage that pastoralists choose their seasonal camps and movement routes considering sedentary area where school-age children and elderly people live in winter and grassland as a workplace. This space usage model is effective even now. Motorization which is linked to technology of movement is another example of qualitative change in modern age. Especially after 2000, it became popular among pastoralists to hold a private car as a means of seasonal movement and a motorbike used for short range movements including daily herding. Among commodities prevailing in this age, generators, batteries, mobile phones, and plastic containers seem to have especially large influence. Plastic containers are significant in that they enable to carry dairy products which in former were difficult to sell by an individual household. However, this change was assisted by spread of mobile phone which made personal communications easier, and by access to electricity which was necessary for use of mobile phone. Now we can predict that influence of internet access to their mobile pastoralism is becoming larger and larger. Recently, in accordance with prevailing of smartphones, usage of applications such as SNS is getting popular. As a result, availability of internet access largely affects pastoralists’ choice on the place of seasonal herding camp. Prevalence of this new infrastructure has a possibility to change their pastoral strategy again, as with past changes of social system and disasters.

Researchers at the Institute of Geography of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences conducted a nationwide survey of the seasonal movements of pastoralists under the collective system in the 1980s and attempted to establish a theory of such movements. This study examines the characteristics of pastoral land use and management during the socialist era based on their results on “The Movement of Pastoralists of the Mongolian People’s Republic.” They attempted to scientifically substantiate the pastoralist system of using the differences in altitude and landscape according to season, and to identify the “correct” migration that fully utilizes the natural conditions and resources.

If wild animals such as deer and wild boars and humans were able to live separately, there would have been little special problems such as agricultural damage and human damage. However, in recently, not only livestock and livestock, but also zoonosis, such as between livestock and humans, have threatened the stability of livestock and human livelihoods. This paper reports on the ecology and characteristics of deer and wild boars, and outlines infectious and epidemic diseases in livestock. Next, representative infectious diseases in the relationship between deer and cattle and wild boar and pigs will be outlined, and points that humans must be careful of will be explained. Finally, I will touch on the risk avoidance of mite infections (SFTS: Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome), which has become more serious in recent years, and edible wild game meat.

This paper reports the progress of our efforts to apply the livestock weight model developed by ourselves in the past to future scenarios. First, I analyzed the results of future scenario experiments of global climate models that incorporate biogeochemical cycles including ecosystems (e.g., Earth system model), and confirmed that the amount of vegetation around Mongolia will basically be projected to increase, and that the degree of this increase is more emphasized in the high temperature scenarios. This can be attributed to the effects of carbon dioxide fertilization, higher temperatures, and higher nitrogen concentrations by fertilizers etc. Next, to prepare input data for the livestock weight model, I presented the results of attempting downscaling method combining an offline vegetation model and a convolutional neural network. The former method achieved a spatial resolution of 0.5°×0.5°, which could be further refined to 8 km×8 km by the latter method. Although some technical problems remain, the results showed the possibility of obtaining future vegetation distribution with sufficient spatial resolution for analyzing nomadism. Finally, using the Leaf Area Index (LAI) distribution for 2021-2030 with RCP 8.5 scenario derived by the above method, and given the assumption that livestock move to the grid with the largest LAI value in the surrounding area each month, the LAI of the grid where livestock stay was calculated. Here, the average LAI for the year preceding the month of April, when livestock weight drops, was presented. In the future, I intend to further improve the downscaling method and the livestock weight model.

This paper discusses the outlook for world agriculture over the next 10 years, global movements regarding livestock production such as greenhouse gases, livestock infectious diseases, and animal welfare, and the situation in Mongolia, plans and future goals for livestock farming in Mongolia and the import/export situation of livestock products in Mongolia. Considering the above situations, the future direction of livestock farming in Mongolia was suggested.

Social norms regarding grassland utilization are important for the sustainable development of pastoralism. This study aims to identify the socioeconomic conditions for the formation of the social norms by comparing those in several different areas in Mongolia. The results show that norms are more likely to be formed in areas with higher population density while less likely to be formed in areas with better access to urban markets. It suggests that active policy interventions are needed to form the social norms under the rapid development of a market economy.

This paper discusses the challenges and changes experienced by mobile pastoralists in Mongolia over the last decade, based on the data collected during the research conducted in Bayan-Unjuul soum, Tuv province, between 2009 and 2011 and between 2021 and 2022. The study utilized questionnaires and open-ended interviews with randomly sampled herding households.

The main findings are as follows. Most respondents recognize the deterioration of pastureland, and the herders more frequently experience extraordinary weather phenomena such as severe sudden sand storms, cold rains in spring, a shift of rainfall peak from the beginning of summer to autumn, and droughts in summer than before. On the other hand, the average number of livestock owned by a household in 2022 had almost doubled compared to 2011. It makes them feel a better livelihood than ten years ago.

However, the labor of pastoralists is more loaded than in 2011 as their average age is significantly higher than then, and they hardly encamp with other households, which need them to manage herding only by themselves. For most households, only the husband and wife herd the livestock. They have introduced items to facilitate their moves, such as a Korean truck, a “Wagonchig,” a trailer, while horse or cattle carts have disappeared. Some herders use the internet where the signal is available, and some even own an apartment in Ulaanbaatar.

The most notable change and challenge that pastoralists face is the alleged deterioration of pastureland and the increased livestock number, which force them to make more extended moves. The proportion of households that have moved more than 50 km has significantly increased. These moves will be across the soum or province borders. They usually move to the neighboring Altanbulag or Buren soums. However, the local herders with a recently increasing exclusive consciousness sometimes drive them out. Therefore, they seek to move to niches where the development has dispersed the local herders, causing the void of the right to the pastureland, such as surrounding areas of the new international airport.

The above challenge has shifted their attitudes towards the right to pastureland from private ownership to public use.

We proposed a new approach to clarify the coupled dynamics between spatio-temporal variation in vegetation quantity and quality (e.g., nutrition and palatability) and livestock behavior in dryland pastures under climate change. Our approach integrates the data obtained from the following surveys by agent-based modeling: a questionnaire survey of herders’ grazing decisions, biologging to capture livestock behavior, satellite remote sensing to understand the spatial distribution of vegetation quantity, and a wide-area vegetation survey to reveal the spatial distribution of species composition. The results of applying this approach to Mongolia confirmed the effectiveness of the abovementioned surveys. Our agent-based model is being developed on the basis of the empirical data obtained.

To consider the sustainable use of Mongolian grasslands, where multiple nomads use the same space, simultaneous observation of multiple domestic animals is important. We compared home ranges and utilized distributions of different temporal scales between 2 domestic horses, which owned by neighboring nomads, in a famous region of airag (fermented horse milk) production, using GPS data collected for more than 1.5 years. Utilized distributions were largely overlapped between the first and second year for the domestic horses, but the overlap between the horses within the same month was smaller. Different pasturing strategies between the neighboring nomads was also suggested. Comparative studies of various sympatric animals using simultaneous GPS tracking will be useful for research on sustainable nomadic pastoralism.