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Tibetan Biodiversity

Partnering with local communities for effective conservation

By Plateau Perspectives

April 9^th, 2020

The Tibetan plateau is the highest, largest mountain region in the world. Situated mostly in western China with average elevations well over 4,000 m and with many snow-capped summits exceeding 7,000 m above sea level, the Tibetan plateau presents to us an unparalleled extreme beauty with a globally unique biodiversity. Further, although the region is not conducive to permanent human settlement, people have nonetheless lived in these high altitude lands for millennia, adapting their livelihoods to the local ecological realities. Through a combination of hunting and (more recently) agro-pastoralism, Tibetans have developed a unique social-ecological system that has survived over the centuries, premised on key livelihood principles of adaptive management of resources with flexibility, seasonal mobility, and opportunistic outlooks.

The author has travelled and worked for many years in the Tibetan region, since 1988, and lived in the region almost permanently from 1996 to 2013. Over these years, he has had opportunity to explore much of the area, with special interest in the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong rivers.

This photo essay seeks to showcase the amazing biodiversity of the Tibetan plateau.

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Solitary wild yak in the arid Kekexili rangelands, with snow-capped peaks in the Kunlun Range in the background

The hills around this plain [near the source of the Yellow River] were literally black with [wild] yak; they could be seen by the thousands.

Diary of a journey through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892 (William Rockhill, 1891)

Most of the territories that I traveled through [in summer 1951] were sparsely populated... some were devoid of any human presence; there, wild animals lived free and undisturbed, between high, majestic mountains covered with perennial ice and snow. In some regions many ice-peaked rocky mountains arose and at their feet in the valleys lived herds of deer and flocks of wild sheep known as nawa (ovis nahura).

The nomads almost always choose for their settling places grassy plains with abundant water where the highland green is studded with innumerable mountain flowers. Herds of Kyang (equus hemionus), wild asses many thousand strong, along with hundreds of wild yaks called drong (bos grunniens), graze on those plateaux along with deer, of antelopes called gowa, dre which is a type of marten... wild sheep called nyen (ovis hodgsoni) and many other species.

In the green valleys, where the song of thousands of cranes resounds, stand the rukor, the encampments of yak-hair tents which shelter from 11 to 30 families settled together to better protect themselves and to more easily defend their camp in case of attack...

Journey Among the Tibetan Nomads: An Account of a Remote Civilization (Namkhai Norbu, 1997)

The world's highest mountain and grassland landscapes, with mighty snow-capped peaks, rivers flowing, and stars ablaze...

Milky Way

Nanga Parbat mountain in the distance

Summer home below the Wugulamei mountain range

Yangtze River

Geologic formation in the Yangtze headwaters

...and wildlife in abundance, with a great diversity of species.

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Tibetan wild ass, or kiang

Tibetan gazelle

Plateau pika

Blue sheep, or bharal

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Altai weasel

Tibetan snowcock

This essay also is a tribute to the people who conserve biodiversity best — the local communities, upon whom the greatest burden lies to conserve the land and its resources, upon which their livelihoods have long depended. The same people may also face the greatest of challenges and future costs, if their access to land and resources were removed, even if in the name of environmental conservation.

This article thus aims both to showcase the extraordinary beauty of the landscapes and wildlife of the Tibetan plateau, and to highlight the prescient measures that have been taken by local communities, both in the distant past and in more recent years, to protect their natural heritage, which is of great local, national and global value.

Tibetan nomadic pastoralism

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Traditional livelihoods have developed over millennia, adapting to the ecological realities, with the grasslands co-evolving with grazing by wildlife and livestock alike, both co-dependent on each other for life and function.

Now, Tibetan herders are encountering and merging their lifestyles with modern technologies, market economies, and globalisation. A fusion is taking place, and the best of both worlds must be sought...

Pastoralist family moving to summer pastures

Mothers and children at community festival

Tibetan tent made of yak hair

Children herding sheep and goats

Winter home in the highlands

Horse race

Yak race

Keeping in touch

The Tibetan nomadic pastoralist lives and carries on his subsistence technique while being battered by windstorms, sandstorms, rainstorms, hailstorms, and snowstorms of awesome dimensions and intensity. It is a constant attack to which he must react with action if he is to survive, and make his way of living supply him with the affluence [livestock] which is his proudest boast...

The routines of herding are not patterns of behavior by rote, but ad hoc responses to exigencies: a continuous exercise of vigilance, calculation, decision-making, and mastery in the control, by a variety of means, of animals which in themselves are unpredictable in situations which change from moment to moment...

[Despite these hardships, Tibetan nomadic pastoralists] simply assume that their way of life is vastly superior to the way of life of the sedentary tillers of the soil

Tibetan nomadic pastoralists: Environments, personality, and ethos (Robert Ekvall, 1974)

Until recently, the domestic yak has always constituted the definitive 'measure' of Tibetan nomadic pastoralist life — providing milk for butter, yoghurt and cheese, also fibre for shelter, power for transport between seasonal camps, meat stored in multiple ways, and much, much more...

Woman weaving yak hair

Children in the summer pastures

Woman and child at loom

Yak hair loom

Tibetan woman milking female yak

People of the Tibetan Plateau

Faces of Tibet

Mammals of the plateau

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The Tibetan plateau presents a unique assemblage of wildlife, rich in montane and grassland species and arid highland ecosystems.

Snow leopard

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Himalayan marmot

Woolly hare

Red fox

Grey wolf

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The kyangs or wild asses, live together in smaller groups, each headed by a stallion, lording it over anything from 10 to 50 mares. I was struck by the noble appearance of these beasts... They look wonderfully elegant and graceful when you see them darting across the steppes like arrows, heads stretched out and tails streaming away behind them in the wind... We would often see kyangs by the thousand spread over the hillsides and looking inquisitively at our caravan; sometimes they would even surround us, though keeping at some distance.

Autobiography of Thubten Jigme Norbu, as told to Heinrich Harrer (translated by E. Fitzgerald, 1960)

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[The Tibetan gazelle] generally moves in small herds of five or seven (seldom as many as twenty), though solitary males are often seen... During their breeding season, which begins towards the close of December and lasts a month, the males chase one another from the herds, but we never saw them fighting like the orongo [chiru].

Mongolia, the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet (Nikolay Prejevalsky, 1876)

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[The White-lipped deer] (Przewalski, 1883) is a physically unique cervid... This species is a high-elevation specialist endemic to the eastern Tibetan Plateau where it inhabits relatively open hills and mountains with a mosaic of forest edges, meadows, and shrublands. The genus Przewalskium was named by Flerov for Colonel Nicholas M. Przewalski, who extensively explored the Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia in the 1870s and 1880s.

Mammalian Species: Przewalskium albirostre (David Leslie Jr., 2010)

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Ever since the 1978 publication of Peter Matthiessen's classic 'The Snow Leopard' brought blue sheep (also called bharal) into the consciousness of Westerners, they have most often been imagined as rare animals that live only in the most remote regions... In fact, blue sheep, which are neither quite blue nor quite sheep, are the common goats of cliff habitat throughout the Tibetan Plateau.

Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West (Rich Harris, 2008)

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Snow leopards have symbolic meaning for Turkic peoples of Central Asia, where the animal is known as irbis. It is widely used in heraldry and as an emblem, such as in the symbol of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

The snow leopard is an irreplaceable symbol of our nations' natural and cultural heritage and an indicator of the health and sustainability of mountain ecosystems; and we recognize that mountain ecosystems inhabited by snow leopards provide essential ecosystem services, including storing and releasing water from the origins of river systems benefitting one-third of the world’s human population; sustaining the pastoral and agricultural livelihoods of local communities which depend on biodiversity for food, fuel, fodder, and medicine; and offering inspiration, recreation, and economic opportunities.

Bishkek Declaration 2013

Plateau Perspectives' community-centred Snow Leopard Community Conservation Project has clearly demonstrated the benefits of working closely with herders for conservation. Traditional custodians of the land are the best partners for ensuring a sustainable future, and should be supported to manage biodiversity — both within and outside formal protected areas.

Camera traps were used for snow leopard monitoring in 2009-10, which identified Yekjengo (Wild Yak White Stone) and its surrounding mountain ranges as high quality snow habitat in the central Tibetan Plateau region – containing amongst the highest snow leopard density in the world, with 9 individuals identified in a mountain area covering only ~150 km2. This project trialed community participation in wildlife research and constituted some of the basic rationale for a regional up-scaling of community-based conservation and co-management in protected areas, through the UNDP/GEF Strengthening the effectiveness of the protected area system in Qinghai province, China to conserve globally important biodiversity project.

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Many other wildlife species also were captured by our camera traps!

Blue sheep

Pallas' cat, or manul cat

Tibetan snowcock

Streaked rosefinch

Red fox

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Blue sheep

In one cave high in the Yekjengo Mountains, situated around 5,000 m above sea level, two brown bear came and explored... and eventually destroyed our camera trap! And all this was 'caught on camera' by a second camera that was placed by Plateau Perspectives field staff in this difficult-to-access location!

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Time-lapse video of all wildlife seen in Yekjungo mountain cave — three months' of close-up observations rendered in just 5 minutes:

The plateau pika is a keystone species because it makes burrows that are the primary homes to a wide variety of small birds and lizards, creates microhabitat disturbance that results in an increase in plant species richness, serves as the principal prey for nearly all of the plateau's predator species, [and] contributes positively to ecosystem-level dynamics. The plateau pika should be managed ... to ensure preservation of China's native biodiversity, as well as long-term sustainable use of the pastureland by domestic livestock.

The plateau pika is a keystone species for biodiversity on the Tibetan plateau (Smith & Foggin, 1999)

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Glover's pika was first described in 1922 by the British zoologist Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas.

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The Altai weasel is found in mountains of Asia, from Russian Central Asia to Korea to northern India — living at elevations up to 3,500 m and higher. The weasel may be found in mixed taiga ecosystems, highland steppes, and above timberline among heaps of stones. (See here to read more information.)

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Kam dwarf hamster is endemic to mountains of western China, where it inhabits the grasslands, shrubby marshes, and alpine steppes.

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The Tibetan fox is a species endemic to the high Tibetan Plateau. It is a fairly small animal (for a fox), weighing between 3-5 kg and standing at around 30 cm high. It has a soft, very dense coat to keep it warm. The Tibetan fox also is noted for what some people have termed a strangely shaped face that resembles the face of an owl, with fur radiating out from the centre — BBC's David Attenborough asks, "Why the square head?" in Planet Earth's Tibetan fox hunt!

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The Himalayan wolf is found in the high altitude ecosystems of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. In evolutionary terms it is an old lineage of wolf. It has been largely overlooked by science and only in recent years is genetic evidence emerging to show that the Himalayan wolf is distinct from the Holarctic grey wolf found in Europe and North America.

The Himalayan Wolves Project

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Birds of the plateau

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Bird life on the Tibetan plateau also is abundant and colourful.

Bar-headed geese, with common coot in foreground

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Common tern

Lesser sand plover

Pallas' gull

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Great spotted woodpecker

Hill pigeon

Hoopoe

Eurasian cuckoo

Little owl

Himalayan griffon

Lammergeyer, or bearded vulture

Himalayan griffon

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Lammergeyer

Upland buzzard

Golden eagle

Saker

Steppe eagle

Cinereous vulture

Common kestrel

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Raven

Black-billed magpie

Red billed chough

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White winged redstart

Kessler's thrush

Horned lark

Hume's ground pecker

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Robin accentor

Robin accentor

Robin accentor

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Hume's groundpecker

White-throated dipper

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Oriental skylark

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Rosy pipit

Robin accentor

Brown accentor

Hume's short toed lark

White wagtail

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Great rosefinch

White browed rosefinch

Streaked rosefinch

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Red fronted rosefinch

Common rosefinch

Tibetan snowfinch

White rumped snowfinch

Rufous necked snowfinch

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Brown dipper

Whimbrel

Plants of the plateau

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And now we are ready to start on our big journey into the cold heart of Asia. The last load is tied on, the last chest band adjusted, and the mules file out and — head for the bazaar, with their tails pointing towards China. A well-aimed stone, flung by an incensed muleteer, turns the leader, and a volley of oaths whistles round his ears as he trots along mulishly in the right direction. We are off.

In the Land of the Blue Poppies (Frank Kingdon Ward, 1913)

Kingdon-Ward accompanied the naturalist Malcolm P. Anderson on a journey across China in 1909-1910 and up the Yangtze River to the borders of Tibet. He discovered no less than three vertebrates new to science and a passion for exploration. But it is as a plant collector that he is best known. Over a period of 30 years he crossed and re-crossed his routes many times in Yunnan, Tibet and Upper Burma and also explored many places in Sikkim, Vietnam, Cambodia and Assam Himalaya. In 1924, he also ventured to the Tsangpo Gorge, one of his most celebrated expeditions. He brought many species of rhododendron, primula, berberis and more to Europe, but it is for the much prized, spectacular Himalayan poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia Franch, that he is best remembered.

Source: Kingdon-Ward, Francis (Frank) (1885-1958)

The Tibetan plateau — a land of great beauty and plant diversity

Meconopsis

Yellow and red saxifraga

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Low blue daisy

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Stellaria chamjamse

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Leontopodium

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Phlomis rotata

White and blue iris

Red grass

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Primula, edelweiss, ranunculus

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Wild rhubarb

White gentian

White poppy

White saxifraga

Tibetan yellow poppy

Yellow ranunculus

Oreosolen wattii

Incarvillea younghusbandii

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Meconopsis horridula

And other wildlife, too

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Winds of Change

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In recent decades, however, much has changed on the Tibetan plateau. Not only has the regional climate been changing and nature reserves established, but many other developments likewise have been implemented... bringing changes to lifestyles as well as people's outlooks on the future.

Traditional ways are changing, but the 'new normal' has yet to be more fully established. Many questions remain unanswered, the future still uncertain...

Winter home in Duocai district

Participating in these changes in a mediating role, bridging between several different worlds, Plateau Perspectives has been encouraging and strengthening the development of community-led conservation and more inclusive forms of sustainable development in the Yangtze River headwaters since 1998.

As elsewhere, challenges have included development policies and programmes that do not adequately value traditional knowledge and people's livelihoods, increasing human-wildlife conflict, and sometimes inappropriate forms of 'privatisation' that do not correspond to ecological conditions...

Our primary response and action has been to identify local people and voices with whom to partner, and to bring global perspectives that can be carefully considered in relation to the actual situations — yet always also working together in genuine partnership.

Author driving remote grassland tracks

Household under 'sipeitao' (four-in-one) scheme, c. 2006

Herder's home destroyed by brown bear, c. 2007 (photo: Fiona Worthy)

Trucks delivering fencing material to remote grassland areas

Community conservation

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Fortunately, there are innovative and courageous people and organisations at the forefront of community development and conservation dialogues, including within the realm of designing and developing protected areas, such as national parks.

Working in partnership with such people and groups, it has been possible to promote and to advance more inclusive approaches — such as "co-management" in China's new national park system.

Yet even aside from formal protected areas, local Tibetan herding communities have long participated in and promoted biodiversity conservation through their traditional lifestyles and belief systems, and since the 1990s they also have actively engaged in promoting a conservation ethic with development of 'local protected areas' and raising environmental awareness through local village schools.

Community conservation festival, Jiongqu village, c. 2006

Community wildlife monitoring team, c. 2001

Snow leopard expedition, January 2010

Exploratory trip in Muqu community, July 1998

Cuochitan wetland

Searching for wetland bird nesting habitat, May 2003

Wildlife monitoring in 'Yicun Yidian' community co-management project

Qinghai Lake

Wetland in Riyue Mountain foothills

Community festival in Zhiduo county, c. 2007

Dr J Marc Foggin is a conservation biologist who has travelled in the Tibetan plateau region since 1998. He founded and co-directs the conservation and development work of Plateau Perspectives together with his wife, Dr Marion E Torrance-Foggin. (For more background, see the other Exposure article entitled Twenty Years).

Dr Foggin also serves as honorary research associate in the Institute of Asian Research in the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs, University of British Columbia.

Marc and his family lived and worked in the beautiful Sanjiangyuan region for many years. They now live in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic.

Author in northwest Sichuan, July 1997

This photo essay is a tribute to the Upper Yangtze Organization, and also to all community members in the Suojia area who so warmly welcomed us into their lives.

The Upper Yangtze Organization (UYO) was the first grassroots organization to be established in the Sanjiangyuan region, with its membership comprised mainly of local community members from across Zhiduo county. In addition, many people across China also have lent their support as friends and partners. Plateau Perspectives has partnered with the UYO since the beginning, and together they co-created and developed the local protected areas and partnerships that later transformed into the co-management model adopted into China's first national park, the Sanjiangyuan National Park.

For a longer review of these conservation developments, see here.

Founders of the Upper Yangtze Organisation, 1998

Traditional yak hair tent on the Tibetan grasslands

To cite:Foggin, J. M. 2020. Tibetan Biodiversity: Partnering with local communities for effective conservation. Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic: Plateau Perspectives. https://stories.plateauperspectives.org/tibetan-biodiversity

All photographs © Foggin 2020, unless noted otherwise

for more information...

Biodiversity and sustainable development

Foggin, J.M. (2000). Biodiversity protection and the search for sustainability in Tibetan plateau grasslands. PhD dissertation. Arizona State University, Tempe, USA. 397 pp. URL: http://www.plateauperspectives.org/foggin2000/

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About high mountains, monsoons, and biodiversity...

Spicer, R.A. (2017). Tibet, the Himalaya, Asian monsoons and biodiversity – In what ways are they related? Plant Diversity, 39(5): 233-244. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pld.2017.09.001

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How the geological emergence of the Tibetan Plateau shaped modern biodiversity

Deng T, Wu F, Zhou Z, Su T. 2020. Tibetan Plateau: An evolutionary junction for the history of modern biodiversity. Science China Earth Sciences, 63: 172–187.

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Community co-management for biodiversity conservation

Foggin, J.M. 2012. Pastoralists and wildlife conservation in western China: collaborative management within protected areas on the Tibetan Plateau. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 2:17.

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Meet the villagers who protect the plateau's biodiversity

Lü Zhi. (2017). Meet the villagers who protect biodiversity on the top of the world. The Conversation, 7 June 2017.

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Building partnerships for community conservation

Foggin, J.M. 2005. Highland Encounters: Building new partnerships for conservation and sustainable development in the Yangtze River headwaters, heart of the Tibetan Plateau. In J. Velasquez, M. Yashiro, S. Yoshimura and I. Ono (eds), Innovative Communities: People- centred Approaches to Environmental Management in the Asia-Pacific Region. Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University (UNU) Press.

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Footnotes

Our sincere thanks are hereby extended to all our friends and partners who welcomed us as we lived and worked over the past three decades in the Tibetan plateau region. We will always remember you!

FootNotes

Our sincere thanks are hereby extended to all our friends and partners who welcomed us as we lived and worked over the past three decades in the Tibetan plateau region. We will always remember you!

© 2026 Plateau Perspectives

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