Students cooperate to water seedlings in the desert.

In the summer holiday, a team of students from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) has travelled all the way to plant trees in the Tengri Desert in Minqin County, Gansu Province.

This social practice program originated in 2014 when student Lyu Meiwang learned from news that Minqin is surrounded by desert on three sides and would be swallowed up by the desert in 17 years if no action was taken.

A view of saxaul trees planted by NUAA students

Lyu led a team of 15 students to leave Nanjing and travelled 33 hours by train to reach Minqin. In 14 days, the team laid down straw checkerboard barriers over an area of 1,000 square meters, built to fight expanding desert.

In 2022, the project won support of other universities including Beijing Institute of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Jiangnan University and China Academy of Art. In total, 162 students in two teams continued the fight against desertification this summer.

A view of a new shoot from a young sacsaoul tree (Photo/Tang Yujie)

In the dry and harsh environments, only few plant species can be used for stabilization of desert soils, such as sacsaoul and sea-buckthorn. Over the years, NUAA student teams have tried to make improvement. For example, the way of transplanting the seedlings firstly grown in cups can improve the young plant survival rate, but the methods are too complicated to be used in large area. This year, students tried another way of planting the processed sacsaoul seedlings. Now they have planted nearly 20,000 such seedlings over an area of 140,000 sqm.

The students hope their efforts can help prevent Minqin from becoming a second Lop Nur, which was once a huge lake surrounded by fertile land and then disappeared in the Gobi desert.

“What the desert really needs is not a seedling or a tree, but the awareness of everyone to protect the environment,” said team leader Tang Yujie.