Sand barriers of straw checkerboards for habitat restoration in extremely arid desert regions

Many human exploitations and constructions, such as pipeline corridors, power transmission lines and transportation routes, suffer from damage due to sand transport and dune burial in arid desert regions. It is a challenge for ecologists to stabilize mobile dunes and to change them into stable productive ecosystems. The establishment of a straw checkerboard is one of the most effective methods of creating a sand barrier and has been employed since the 1950s in the arid desert regions of the world. In order to better understand its role in the process of ecological restoration, the environmental effects of a straw checkerboard were evaluated through field experimental observation. The results indicate that the straw checkerboard enhanced the capacity of dune systems to entrap dust deposition, leading to the accumulation of soil organic matter and nutrients and to the development of soil formation on the dune surface. The straw checkerboard increased the silt and clay content, thereby changing coarse soil texture to fine. This is one of the vital prerequisites for the invasion and establishment of herbaceous plants in desert ecosystems. When a straw checkerboard was used to stabilize the dunes before establishing sand-binding vegetation, significant differences in plant species richness, herbaceous cover, dust deposition, and soil physicochemical properties were found in this study. All of these findings suggest that the use of the straw checkerboard, as one of the key techniques for restoring desert ecosystems, will be an important component of efforts to further extend ecological engineering projects in arid desert regions.