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Kyrgyzstan’s historic walnut forest spans tens of hundreds of acres throughout the flanks of the Babash-Alta mountains. For generations, these pure woodlands have supported communities dwelling on its fringes, in a sprawling community of villages collectively often known as Arslanbob.
October is a standard time of celebration when villagers transfer into the forest for just a few weeks to assemble nuts. This bounty is distributed off alongside commerce routes that hint the outdated Silk Highway, passing by native markets throughout the Jalalabad area of Kyrgyzstan and on to Turkey, Russia, and Iran.
However the forests are coming below strain from local weather change and soil erosion — and from overgrazing. Native initiatives try to protect this distinctive pure useful resource by participating villagers in higher administration, not solely of the forest itself but additionally of surrounding pastures.
Pressured pastures imply confused forests
Historically, livestock stays near the village through the winter months, and in summer season villagers drive their animals to summer season pastures within the highlands above the forest. However this is usually a journey of a number of days and more and more, these pastures, just like the forest, aren’t as lush as they was once.
As a substitute, villagers are grazing their animals on the nearer winter pastures, that means when summer season ends there is not sufficient fodder to see them by the chilly months, and livestock are let free to graze within the forest.
Hayat Tarikov, a retired forest ranger who spent his profession sustaining the walnut forest, says the animals strip the forest ground of uncollected nuts and eat the buds off younger bushes and shrubs within the spring, making it harder for the forest to regenerate and thrive.
“If individuals saved their animals off the forest from September till Could, then the flora on the forest ground may get better,” Tarikov says.
Smartphone information to handle grazing
Grazing rights in Kyrgyzstan are granted by a decentralized system of regional pasture committees, composed of village leaders and shepherds.
Annually, Aziz Chirmashev receives a allow to make use of highland pastures. When the grazing season begins in early summer season, he travels there with a 200-head herd of sheep, goats, horses, and cows belonging to villagers in Arslanbob. Because the summer season attracts on, he drives his herd greater and better to achieve contemporary grass.
“Our pastures are getting worse,” Chimarshev says.
However to pin down simply how a lot worse, and the place — to determine how a lot grazing a given pasture can maintain — Central Asian environmental NGO Camp Alatoo is testing a smartphone app to map pasture well being within the area.
The leaders of pasture committees gather and feed in information on stone cowl, lichens, naked floor, and plant cowl. This info helps decide how a lot grazing every space can assist, and for the way lengthy.
“Yr-to-year, it’s tough to inform the well being of a pasture,” explains Zhyrgal Kozhomberdiev, chief of pasture administration at Camp Alatoo, “however 5 years of knowledge can be a place to begin to attract conclusions on the adjustments of a grazing space or area.”
With this information, Kozhomberdiev says, the committees may assist shepherds like Chirmashev attain underutilized pastures farther from the forest.
Sowing the seeds of resilience
The Ministry of Agriculture says it additionally has plans to provide seeds of the vegetation sometimes present in wholesome pastures and sow them in degraded land the place overgrazing has left solely unpalatable vegetation.
With these initiatives to revive pastures, and render distant pastures extra accessible, the hope is that herders will not flip to the forests to graze their animals.
On the similar time, extra direct motion can be being taken to enhance the well being of the forest. Kozhomberdiev says that since 2021, foresters have been monitoring walnut bushes to determine these extra immune to soil erosion and irregular water cycles.
The plan is to gather nuts from these resilient mom bushes and develop saplings that can then be planted within the forest. However this is not a fast repair. On common, walnut seedlings want 5 years of fine situations earlier than they fruit — years by which they’re notably weak to hungry cattle and goats.
‘The forest calls them house’
Kozhomberdiev hopes that poor walnut harvests lately will function a warning to “shepherds and villagers to recollect the rhythm of the land and restrict the animals’ grazing.”
Today, the rhythm of life in Arslanbob is not solely dictated by the forest harvest, by occasions to winter down or scale the mountains seeking lush pasture, but additionally by the seasonal work that takes many villagers overseas, to neighboring Kazakhstan or to Russia.
However Tarikov says that removed from abandoning conventional methods of life, they typically come again with a deepened want to see the traditional forest preserved. “One factor that’s totally different about Arslanbob is that when younger individuals depart right here searching for work elsewhere, they arrive again,” he says. “This forest calls them house.”
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