Ecocar Central Asia

EcoCAR stands for ecosystem assessment and capacity building for sustainable management of floodplains along the Central Asian rivers Tarim and Naryn.
These rivers and their floodplains have an enormous ecological importance. The riparian vegetation is not only a hotspot of biodiversity, but also provides a number of ecosystem functions and services like the avoidance of erosion, the reduction of the effects of sand and dust storms or the provision of pastoral land. Despite this importance the Central Asian floodplains are heavily endangered by degradation due to overexploitation of water resources, agriculture and overgrazing by pastoral use. Nevertheless there is no systematic monitoring of riparian ecosystems and linked functions or services. Although these problems recently occur in many countries there are no networks of scientists and decision makers from the different Central Asian countries working on similar environmental issues to develop strategies of sustainable land use.
Here EcoCAR starts and develops methods for the terrestrial and remotely sensed monitoring of riparian ecosystems and its most important stress indicators in two investigation areas at the Tarim (Xinjiang) and the Naryn (Kirgizstan).Additionally the capacity of vegetation of avoiding soil erosion will be analyzed. Based on this the potential of providing certain ecosystem services will be predicted and suggestions for sustainable land use will be given. A special focus will be on the integration and networking with and among local scientists, decision makers and students to build up the necessary capacities to use the methods developed within this project to cope with the environmental problems in their countries on the way to more sustainability in riparian ecosystems.