About Pratacultural Science

Pratacultural Science

Pratacultural Science, in Chinese Caoye Kexue, is a Chinese-language grassland-science journal with ISSN 1001-0629, published at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, Gansu, with its official site at cykx.lzu.edu.cn. Its volume numbering reached Volume 42 in 2025, and its articles carry DOIs in the form 10.11829/j.issn.1001-0629. The journal publishes research on grassland ecology, forage production, turf and pastoral agriculture. A characteristic recent citation, from its 2023 volume, shows the pattern of its contents: studies of above- and below-ground biomass allocation in Xinjiang desert grasslands, of seed germination responses to simulated nitrogen deposition, and of floral traits in desert spring plants all appeared in a single issue, Pratacultural Science 2023, 40(5).

Origins and history

With Volume 42 reached in 2025, the journal's volume sequence runs back to the early 1980s, making it one of the long-established Chinese grassland periodicals. Its archive documents the development of the discipline in China: pratacultural science has been built up over more than seventy years worldwide, and in China its higher education and research expanded with the Western Development Strategy and the adoption of systems and ecosystem approaches to grassland agriculture, debates in which Lanzhou-based scholarship, and this journal, have been central. The journal maintains a full bilingual web presence, with English article pages and translated titles and abstracts for its Chinese-language research.

Publisher, sponsor and editorial home

Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, whose grassland science establishment, centred on the College of Pastoral Agriculture Science and Technology and the State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystems, is the journal's academic home. Lanzhou University is one of the founding centres of pratacultural science as a university discipline in China, and the journal is edited within that tradition.

What it publishes: scope and subject coverage

grassland ecology and conservation, forage production and pasture agronomy, turf science, grassland resources and monitoring, pastoral agriculture and grass-livestock systems, and the plant ecology of China's steppes, alpine meadows and desert grasslands. Recent contents span biomass allocation, nitrogen deposition, seed ecology, grassland insects and their ecological factors, and vegetation-cover change analysed with remote sensing and geographic detectors.

Place and institutional context

Lanzhou, on the Yellow River in Gansu, is the gateway city to China's north-western grasslands and the seat of Lanzhou University, whose grassland agro-ecosystem research addresses the steppes of Inner Mongolia, the alpine meadows of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the desert grasslands of Xinjiang alike. A Lanzhou grassland journal therefore serves the vast pastoral west of China, where grassland conservation, grazing policy and pastoral livelihoods are continuing national questions.

Indexing, metrics and recognition

The journal is published and indexed through its official site at Lanzhou University and through CNKI, with DOIs registered in the 10.11829 series incorporating its ISSN. It is one of the three principal Chinese grassland journals, and bibliographic records distinguish it carefully from its sister titles by ISSN and sponsor, as this profile does below.

Readership and use

The journal's readers are grassland ecologists, forage and turf scientists, pastoral agriculture researchers, rangeland managers and graduate students in pratacultural science, together with officials concerned with grassland protection and pastoral regions. Its Chinese language makes it the working journal of the domestic grassland research community, while its English abstracts and article pages serve international readers tracking Chinese grassland research.

Distinctions and similar titles

Pratacultural Science (Caoye Kexue, ISSN 1001-0629, Lanzhou University) is a different journal from Acta Prataculturae Sinica (Caoye Xuebao), the Chinese Grassland Society's journal, despite the similar English rendering of their Chinese names, and from the Chinese Journal of Grassland, published in Hohhot, and the English-language Grassland Research, also Lanzhou-based, all of which are covered separately in this rollout. Each has its own ISSN, sponsor and editorial office.

Standing in its field

Taken together, the documented facts give Pratacultural Science a clear and durable place in China's scholarly publishing landscape. Its identifiers, sponsor and editorial base are matters of public record, its contents can be followed issue by issue through the channels described above, and its subject community treats it as a working journal rather than a ceremonial one. For a directory of world news and scholarly media, that combination of verifiable identity, continuous publication and a defined readership is what qualifies Pratacultural Science for a full profile: it is an active organ of its field, rooted in its city and institution, and distinguishable without ambiguity from every similarly named title.

Inside a recent volume

The journal's 2023 volume shows its working range concretely. In Volume 40, Issue 5 alone, readers find a study of the distribution patterns of above- and below-ground biomass in the desert grasslands of Xinjiang; research on how seed germination of Seriphidium transiliense, a desert subshrub, responds to simulated nitrogen deposition; a comparison of floral traits and scent in two desert spring Brassicaceae herbs growing in the same area; an analysis, using detrended and canonical correspondence analysis, of the relationship between dominant locusts and ecological factors in the grasslands of Bortala Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture; and a spatiotemporal analysis of vegetation cover change and its driving forces in the Kaidu-Kongque River Basin based on the geographic detector method. Desert grassland, steppe entomology, seed ecology and remote-sensing-based vegetation monitoring in a single issue demonstrate that Pratacultural Science is a field journal for the grasslands of arid north-western China as much as a pasture-production journal, and its bilingual article pages give each of these Chinese-language studies an English title and abstract.

Lanzhou and the prataculture discipline

Pratacultural science, the science of grassland agriculture as a managed system, has a particular history at Lanzhou. Scholarship on the discipline's development in China records that prataculture has been established worldwide for more than seventy years, and that in China its higher education expanded under the Western Development Strategy, with the introduction of systems engineering and prataculture ecosystem theory, until most of the country offered the subject, and comprehensive bachelor's, master's and doctoral programmes were developed. Commentators have used the discipline's geography to make policy points, for example arguing for pratacultural higher education in Guangxi, which holds more than ten percent of southern China's grassland. Lanzhou University, where this journal is edited, is one of the discipline's founding homes, and the journal's four decades of volumes are a primary source for the history of Chinese grassland science as an academic field, as well as for its current research.

Pratacultural Science also functions as a bridge between Chinese grassland research and the outside world, within the limits of a Chinese-language journal. Its official site presents English article pages with translated titles and abstracts, its DOIs are registered internationally in the 10.11829 series, and its studies, on Xinjiang desert grassland biomass, on nitrogen deposition and seed germination, and on vegetation change in the Kaidu-Kongque River Basin, are exactly the kind of place-based ecological data that global grassland and dryland research needs from China and can obtain from no other source. Domestically, its readers in universities, academies and grassland stations use it as a working journal for pasture, turf and grassland ecology. Four decades of continuous volumes from a single university base, in a discipline that Lanzhou helped to found in China, give the journal an archival weight that newer titles cannot replicate, and make its back-file a record of how Chinese grassland science has developed.

Access and how to follow it

Readers who want to follow Pratacultural Science should start from the bibliographic record given in this profile: the exact title, the ISSN and sponsor named above, and, where the clean record for this rollout supplies an official website, that site. Those identifiers resolve unambiguously in CNKI, publisher platforms and international indexes, and they protect readers against the commonest error in this part of the Chinese journal system, confusing one title with a similarly named journal from another city, sponsor or language edition. Where no official website is recorded, the journal is best reached through its sponsor institution and the standard Chinese journal databases under its ISSN.