Controlling Sand Movement Through Mechanical Measures: China’s Experience

Synopsis

This chapter is an overview of the measures taken to stabilize mobile sand to protect farmland, and infrastructure such as roads, railway tracks and irrigation canals. The chapter explains in detail the various proven practices accumulated from years of trial and error and derived from scientific investigation in China’s extensive sandy lands.

Key Points

• China is one of the states facing serious problems of desertification in the world. The affected lands are mainly distributed in arid semi- arid and dry sub humid areas in the west part of Northeast China, North Central China and the most part of Northwest China. Shifting sand is one of the serious contributors to desertification in China.

• China has developed very successful measures to stabilize shifting sands and revegetate denuded areas. These technologies have been tested under extremely difficult conditions in China’s arid north west and are now used with equal success throughout the world.

• There are two complementary measures used to fix shifting sands. One is to protect the vegetation on the sand dunes or where such vegetation has deteriorated, to plant trees, shrubs and grasses (see Chap. 3). This type is known as biological or plant measures. The other method depends on mechanical measures. These are used to set up barriers on sand dunes or to cover the surface of sand dunes by wheat straw, clay, and branches of trees, bamboo, reeds, sorghum stalks, cobblestone, and petroleum chemicals and so on. Mechanical measures have been proven to be effective in fixing shifting sand dunes. However, their success is limited to a number of years, hence; they should be complemented with other measures, especially the biological measures. This is where suitable desert plant species are planted immediately after the shifting sand is fixed so that permanent solutions can be attained.