Traditional Removal Strategies Mitigate Shrub Encroachment Driven by Canopy Competition on the Tibetan Plateau
Jianping Yang, Peixi Su, Xianhong Meng, Zijuan Zhou, Rui Shi, Xinjing Ding · 2025
Read Traditional Removal Strategies Mitigate Shrub Encroachment Driven by Canopy Competition on the Tibetan Plateau by Jianping Yang, Peixi Su, Xianhong Meng, Zijuan Zhou, Rui Shi, Xinjing Ding (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12699206.txt.
Description
Jianping Yang and co-authors published this grassland study in 2025. Shrubs are spreading across the alpine meadows of the Tibetan Plateau as the climate warms and grazing pressure grows. Tibetan herders have fought the spread for centuries by uprooting shrubs, burning patches in the dormant season, and rotating herds. The team measured encroachment across the Zoige Plateau at heights from 3,400 to 3,900 meters. They also ran experiments removing shrubs, restricting canopies, and excluding roots.
Elevation strongly limited how fast shrubs spread in the short term. The experiments showed that shade from shrub canopies does most of the damage, explaining about sixty percent of the change. Roots mattered far less, at under three percent. Canopy shade starves the grasses beneath, letting shrubs tighten their hold. Traditional herding methods strike exactly at that canopy advantage. By cutting the shade, they free the understory grasses to recover.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jianping Yang, Peixi Su, Xianhong Meng, Zijuan Zhou, Rui Shi, Xinjing Ding |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |