At around 53,000 square kilometers, the Great Gobi declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1991, is the largest nature reserve of its kind in Asia and among the five largest worldwide. Here, on the border with China, some rare and endangered species of flora and fauna live. The protected area is divided into two geographically separate areas, approximately 400 kilometers apart. The Great Gobi A Protected Area, also known as the Trans-Altai-Gobi National Park, is 44,000 square kilometers in size and is located in the very south of the country. At 9000 square kilometers, Great Gobi B is significantly smaller in the southwestern tip of Mongolia. The habitats of the two areas differ considerably in terms of human use, climate, flora, and fauna.
Both areas are important living spaces for humans and animals. In summer the nomads graze their livestock in the cooler plateaus, in winter they spend in the lowlands of the reserve. In order to compensate for the losses that extremely cold winters inflict on the herds, the tendency is for the herds to get bigger and bigger. As the ecosystem is very fragile due to the short three-month vegetation period and suffers from overgrazing extremely quickly, there is real food competition between wild and farm animals, which has a negative impact on the entire plant world because between the summer and winter temperatures are sometimes between 80 and 90 ° C difference.
The efforts of the National Park Administration are therefore going away. Find projects that provide nomads with additional income outside of livestock farming so that nomads can benefit directly from the protected areas. Another goal is the acceptance of the nature reserves with all requirements because if one of the most important ecosystems in Central Asia is destroyed in the long term. In the far east, near the border with China, there are two special places that are different from regular parks. They are called Little Gobi Darhan A and Little Gobi Darhan B, and they are protected areas.
