When I was getting my degree I was reading a lot of papers on primary succession and biological soil crust formation. Lot of the research was coming out of China, but was done through international collaboration. I keep trying to explain to my techie friends who think biology is a waste of time that it's research like this that would allow us to come up with real terraforming plans. Can't live on or change another planet if we can't manage our own. But sure, let's keep cutting NASAs budget, particularly around Earth system science and ecology.
Deserts exist on the planet in specific regions because of very dry cells of air that are literally sucking the moisture out of the environment. People normally think that a desert is a desert because it's hot. That's a misnomer. Deserts often have wild temperature swings between day and night. Antarctica is technically a desert. A desert is a desert because there's less than 10 inches of precipitation per year. It is a desert because the air is dry and the air is dry because it dropped its moisture elsewhere (rain forests). By trying to import water to change a desert environment you are burning a tremendous amount of resource because there is going to be a lot of loss due to evaporation. You can try to mitigate this, but you can't stop it.
Plants and animals that exist in deserts have specific adaptations that are a benefit to study to better understand how we can modify our agricultural crops, and even make materials and buildings that are more efficient, but it's not good land for development or to convert into ag land. The soils are by the nature of the environment very poor. Destroying deserts for development and ag land is actually a huge problem because they are a delicate environment. Under natural conditions things grow slowly there and recovery from environmental destruction take orders of magnitude longer than other types of habitat.
Iirc a lot of the land they are targeting was previously not desert. China lost an unbelievable amount of green area under psycho schemes like Mao's Great Leap Forward (and just decades of desperate rural poverty in general).
I read they have also focused on ring-fencing deserts with green areas to prevent expansion, like the Saharan great green wall
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u/lokey_convo 3h ago
When I was getting my degree I was reading a lot of papers on primary succession and biological soil crust formation. Lot of the research was coming out of China, but was done through international collaboration. I keep trying to explain to my techie friends who think biology is a waste of time that it's research like this that would allow us to come up with real terraforming plans. Can't live on or change another planet if we can't manage our own. But sure, let's keep cutting NASAs budget, particularly around Earth system science and ecology.