Mongolia has 156 million hectares of grasslands, with approximately two-thirds as pasture and 1.7 million hectares for agriculture. Over half of Mongolia’s grasslands are classified as degraded, partly due to overgrazing. They wish to improve monitoring of vegetation health.

With global desertification increasing alongside global temperature rise, researchers at the Botanic Garden and Research Institute at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, decided to use satellite technologies – remote sensing to evaluate biomass, specifically above ground dry biomass (ADB). They wanted to compare grazed with ungrazed areas.

The Mongolian Academy of Sciences has been collecting biomass through field studies since 2009. Biomass is calculated after the plants have dried in the lab after collection. They selected three sites and analysed desert, dry and mountain grasslands between 2020 – 2023:

They hand harvested 85 plots for determining the aboveground biomass and used 343 PlanetScope satellite images with a minimum of 100 images for each type of grassland. They then used linear regression analysis to create a model to predict future conditions. Unsurprisingly, ungrased biomass was higher than grazed. They noticed an ongoing increase in variation between ungrazed and grazed land. However in the future they would like to use additional data for comparison before drawing conclusions such as weather, herd sizes and population data.

Overall they believe the benefits from the PlanetScope remote sensing system provides a more comprehensive picture of degradation across the different types of grassland

Jargalsaikhan, M.-E.; Ichikawa, D.; Nagai, M.; Indree, T.; Katiyar, V.; Munkhtur, D.; Dashdondog, E. Aboveground Biomass Estimation and Time Series Analyses in Mongolian Grasslands Utilizing PlanetScope Imagery. Remote Sens. 2024, 16, 869. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16050869