Maps, Mountains and Moleskin

I just returned to my office from a rush hour bike ride around Beijing. This was intentional. Tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon I depart for Xining, the capital city of the Qinghai Province (location B on Map 1). Qinghai is a province almost twice the size of my home state of Montana. There are about 5.5 million people there, almost half of which live in Xining. Beijing is residence to over 20 million people. Beijing is neither the largest nor most densely populated city in the world, but good god it’s big enough! To say I’m looking forward to getting out of the city and into the wilds of the Tibetan Plateau…would be a ridiculous thing to say. Of course I am! My suicide ride around town had a purpose. All of the incessant honks, bells, yells, stares, cries, hisses and barely avoided bus kisses served to squeegee the last nano-drops of excitement, enthusiasm and anticipation into my thinly veiled demeanor of calm. A calm that dictated an answer to the question of what I thought about seeing Qinghai for the first time as a coy, “it should be interesting.” I can’t explain why, but I have to hold in my excitement, as if showing it now will somehow diminish the pleasure of the first steps of my first hike in a place that, just months ago, I was uncertain that I’d ever see.  At the risk of being a bit melodramatic, this is a pretty cool moment for me…yet, part of me insists that it is just a job. We all have to make a living somehow, right? But seriously, part of my job means spending seven weeks gallivanting around the Tibetan Plateau? C’mon, that is ridiculous!

Map 1. You're looking at Asia. Markers A-E indicate Beijing, Xining, Yushu, Zhiduo and Suojiaxiang, respectively. The red polygon is a rough outline of the Sanjiangyuan region.

I look forward to sharing photos and stories in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’ll continue to describe a bit of where I’ll be going and what I’ll be doing. Upon landing in Xining, we will spend a couple of days gathering permits (being a foreigner I can’t just wander around the country unsupervised), buying field supplies and groceries and meeting a variety of individuals with whom it is “encouraged” to keep appraised of our research activities. 

By Thursday morning we hit the road in one of the field vehicles and drive the 814 km (~500 miles) to Yushu (location C on Map 1, and location B on Maps 2 and 3). For any of you news junkies or seismology enthusiasts, Yushu may sound familiar as the site of a destructive earthquake in the spring of 2010 (photos). It was a devastating earthquake, killing thousands, but mostly avoided the scandals of the apocalyptic 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

Map 2. Qinghai Province. Markers A-D indicate Xining, Yushu, Zhiduo and Suojiaxiang, respectively. As per above, the red polygon is the Sanjiangyuan region.

Map 3. This depicts mostly the Sanjiangyuan region. Markers B-D are the same as Map 2.

Yushu is large enough to have an airport and commercial flights, however we are electing to drive for a couple of reasons. 1) We need the field vehicle anyways, 2) it provides an opportunity for me to see the countryside and 3) it allows time for a more gradual adjustment to the altitude. At my apartment in Beijing, I am at 162 feet above sea level (according to google earth). Xining is at roughly 7400 feet above sea level. Yushu, on the other hand, is at about 12,120 feet! The roads to Yushu should be in good condition, however, climbing that 4700 feet over a winding mountain road means we are looking at a 17 hour drive. After Yushu, the terrain remains challenging and the roads now equal that challenge. From Yushu, at a considerably slower pace, we head to Zhiduo (location C on Maps 2 and 3) and from there to Suojiaxiang (location D on Maps 2, 3 and 4). Suojiaxiang is at about 14,600 feet. For perspective, the highest elevation I’ve ever experienced is the highest point in Utah, King’s Peak, which tops out at a seemingly paltry 13,528 feet.  However, Suojiaxiang is not our final destination; from here it is another 2.5 hours to reach the monastery that serves as our base camp, located at about 15,500 feet!  I am uncertain as to the exact location of the monastery, but it is somewhere within the red circle on map 4.

Map 4. In the western part of the Sanjiangyuan region. Our primary basecamp is located at a monastery somewhere within the red circle. The Yangtze Rive is indicated in the upper left. Marker D indicates the location of the town of Suojiaxiang.

Our greater study area is located within the SanjiangyuanNational Nature Reserve (as indicated with the red polygon in maps 1 and 2). Sanjiangyuan translates to Three Rivers Region. Within this area are the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong rivers, rivers whose proper functioning is depended on by over 600 million people downstream. The Sanjiangyuan region covers about 320,000 square km (slightly larger than New Mexico or Poland) of which nearly half is protected in reserves. This equates to the second largest protected area in the world. There are about 200,000 inhabitants, largely consisting of small villages with pastoral-based economies.

What am I doing here? That is both a literal and a meta-physical question. I’ll address the former, briefly for now, and leave the latter for when I’m feeling more transcendental due to cerebral hypoxia at the monastery. The flagship of our research and conservation efforts is the snow leopard. The “our” and “we” that I refer to include myself as a representative of Panthera, staff from the Chinese NGO Shan Shui, and graduate students in the biology department at Peking University. Additional partners include other snow leopard focused NGOs such as the Snow Leopard Trust, and of course nothing is done without the cooperation of local and federal government officials. Our research and conservation efforts are diverse and in some cases yet to be defined. Snow leopards are an elusive animal that lives in naturally low densities in remote areas that are difficult to access and navigate. This makes even some of their basic ecology a mystery. Known conservation concerns largely surround the availability of natural prey and, reciprocally, the retaliatory killings by herders in response to snow leopards preying upon livestock. As yet unknown, are the effects of mines (legal and illegal), grazing practices of livestock on wild ungulates, and the ever-present specter of climate change.

Specter may not be the appropriate term. The effect of climate change at these high elevations is very real. The rise in mean temperature parallels what is seen in arctic regions, and the resulting challenges are similar. For example, the permafrost thaws to deeper and deeper soil depths, which then allows for the ecological release of plants with deeper root systems to become established and out-compete the short root systems of the grass species that currently dominate the landscape. Grass species upon which wild ungulates, the snow leopard’s primary prey, depend upon. In this rapidly changing environment we cannot be certain as to the extent of change, but we can make predictions, predictions predicated upon our understanding of the system and all its components. As our understanding of the different components increases, so does our confidence in the accuracy of our predictions. The more accurate our predictions, the more likely that conservation policy and management actions can be successful. 


I fear that I'm becoming a bit abstruse and heading down a tunnel that will require pages to emerge from, or may result in my climbing on the ol' soap box. Suffice it to say, in order to understand the threats to snow leopard persistence, we have to understand the system within which they live. There are a lot of players in this game, there are the snow leopards themselves, there are the animals they eat, the other predators that they compete with for those prey, and then there is their relationship with humans. It is a complex system and it will take much time and effort to resolve anything. Luckily, there is a large, energetic group that is up to the task. The specifics of these tasks and of these people will be topics for future blogs. I have babbled on for long enough in this one. To succinctly answer the question as to what I'm doing, on this particular trip, will be simple. The next seven weeks are my introduction to the Sanjiangyuan region. I will spend time in the field helping graduate students get their field work started, I will do some reconnaissance for areas where we may do carnivore captures in the spring, and I will tour the various other study sites that include newly initiated community conservation programs and a town where two monks from a local monastery are leading their community in exploring and describing the biodiversity around them. In short, I am headed to the Tibetan Plateau to listen, to learn, and to be inspired.