China is seizing the opportunity presented by the flood season in its largest desert for drone assisted ecological restoration.
During the flood season, abundant water from the Yurungkax River created ideal conditions for ecological restoration in the surrounding desert in northwest China. Seizing this opportunity, China channelled flood waters and used a drone to sow tree seeds across the sandy landscape.
The Taklamakan Desert stretches across 337,000 square kilometers. It is encircled by high mountains, which block moist air from reaching the desert for most of the year, creating extremely arid conditions that are too harsh for most plants.
Mass tree planting by China around the edges of the Taklamakan Desert – one of the world’s largest and driest deserts – is turning parts of it into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals.
China finished encircling the Taklamakan Desert with vegetation in 2024, and researchers say the effort has stabilized sand dunes and grown forest cover in the country from 10% of its area in 1949 to more than 25% today.
A recent study “found for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification,” said co-author Yuk-ling Yung. The reseach was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Yuk-ling Yung, a Hong Kong born American physicist, was Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology from 1986 and a senior research scientist in NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He passed away aged 79 on March 16, 2026 following a brief illness.
Sources:
New China TV, 26 Jul 2026. https://youtu.be/jtHKG8A32ow
Live Science, February 11, 2026. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/china-has-planted-so-many-trees-around-the-taklamakan-desert-that-its-turned-this-biological-void-into-a-carbon-sink
PNAS, January 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2523388123
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