In the last few years, wildfires across the world have been increasing rapidly.

Kazakhstan’s vast steppes have become more exposed to hotter and drier conditions lately, greatly exacerbating the risk of wildfires. When incidents break out, fire management techniques largely rely on firebreaks, controlled burns, firefighting infrastructure and monitoring.

However, across parts of Kazakhstan, a key herbivore is doing something far more basic to reduce the risk of wildfires: eating vegetation.

The saiga antelope, pushed to the brink of extinction in the 20th century, has now bounced back remarkably.

As Kazakhstan looks for new ways to make its landscapes more fire-resilient, the recovery of the saiga antelope could have an unexpected benefit by reducing the fuel available for wildfires.

The Comeback Of The Saiga Antelope

Historically, the saiga antelope was spread across the Eurasian steppe, which stretches from Hungary and Eastern Europe through Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, all the way to Manchuria in China.

Saiga poaching saw a sharp surge following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and subsequent widespread poverty and unemployment. This was both for its meat and the male saiga’s horns, which were believed to have valuable medicinal properties and were used in traditional Chinese medicine.

This led to saiga numbers plummeting around 95% by the late 1990s to early 2000s, according to the Convention on Migratory Species .

A severe bacterial outbreak in 2015 further killed more than 200,000 saigas in Kazakhstan. The rapid increase of oil and gas exploration and expansion of transportation corridors also heavily obstructed saiga migrations and access to traditional pastures.

Similarly, rising livestock numbers further depleted these pastures.

Since then, the global saiga population has made a significant recovery to around 4.1 million individuals in 2025 across Eurasia, mainly concentrated in Kazakhstan, according to The Astana Times .

This has led to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgrading their status from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened.

The rebound was largely due to robust anti-poaching crackdowns by the government, supported by groups like the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative deploying state rangers to further prevent illegal hunting for horns and meat.

Along with efforts to reduce poaching, habitat protection also became a greater priority, leading to large new nature reserves and protected areas being established across core migration and calving grounds across Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

Many saiga females also give birth to twins every year, which allowed the population to multiply rapidly when threats like habitat loss and poaching decreased.

Other initiatives, such as the increased use of monitoring programs using tools like satellite tracking and disease prevention efforts also helped stabilize previously fragile numbers.

Why Kazakhstan’s Steppes Are So Prone To Wildfires

One of the major reasons Kazakhstan’s steppes are prone to wildfires is an extreme continental climate, with long, hot and dry summers. This is combined with low rainfall causing vegetation to turn more easily into dry flammable tinder.

Due to the vast and flat terrain, strong brisk winds can also sweep across the open plains and quickly spread small sparks over massive distances.

Grasslands also cover a significant portion of the country. While plants grow considerably in spring, they also turn into heavy biomass that dies back and dries out in summer.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, livestock numbers initially dropped steeply, which led to undergrazing in several areas. Without enough herbivores to eat the vegetation, tall dead grass has accumulated in many regions, acting as abundant fuel for intense fires.

Natural lightning strikes are another common occurrence across the country’s steppes during hot summer storms, further igniting dry grasses.

In some cases, uncontrolled agricultural burning and industrial infrastructure near rural zones also introduce frequent ignition sources.

How Conservation Can Become Wildfire Management

Large keystone herbivores like saiga can significantly help reduce the fuel available for wildfires by eating vegetation. Through systematic grazing, they can potentially alter vegetation height and density, and create potential breaks in otherwise continuously available fuel.

Trampling and the movement of the herds can also further modify vegetation and break fuel continuity, creating a fragmented, mosaic-like firebreak instead. This is mainly because wildfires rely heavily on loose, upright and airy “fine fuels” like dry standing grasses to easily absorb oxygen and spread quickly.

By flattening the fuel bed, this oxygen is greatly restricted, causing the grass to burn much more slowly and less intensely. This also accelerates decomposition into compost by boosting moisture retention.

In the longer run, these movements also fundamentally shift plant species composition by suppressing highly flammable invasive annual grasses and promoting fire-resistent succulents and forbs.

However, apart from potential fire control benefits, the return of saiga antelope also has landscape-wide ecological impacts across the entire Eurasian steppe as highly nomadic megaherbivores.

By consuming a number of grasses and forbs, instead of any one plant species, they ensure that no single species dominates their grazing, which supports a diverse plant ecosystem.

The animals’ movements also create a patchwork of heavily grazed and untouched areas. This structural diversity provides essential nesting habitats and cover for vital threatened steppe birds like the Great Bustard and the critically endangered Sociable Lapwing.

By migrating several hundreds of miles annually, saiga herds also act as long-distance vectors for plant propagation and distribute seeds across a significant area.

They can help stabilize the food chain for regional apex predators like wolves too, along with vulnerable scavenging birds like steppe eagles and the Black Vulture.

The Challenges That Remain

One of the biggest challenges of the saiga rebound is that at this landscape scale, massive herds now overlap with pastoral lands. This can result in human-wildlife conflict with local farmers over shared water sources, pastoral degradation and crop trampling.

The wildfire control effects from grazing also depend heavily on where, when and how intensely the herbivores graze, which may not be a replicable strategy across years or seasons. This is due to the animals being highly mobile and migratory, unlike domesticated livestock.

This makes it almost impossible to ring-fence or herd them into localised, high-risk fire zones.

In some cases, they are also unable to access specific overgrown pastures that may require vegetation management due to infrastructure barriers.

Saiga are also extremely biologically susceptible to catastrophic and rapid mass die-offs, such as bacterial outbreaks triggered by climate factors.

In Kazakhstan especially, rising saiga numbers have led to severe pushback from local communities concerned about their impact on agriculture. This in turn, has led to controlled, government-sanctioned culls to protect agricultural activity.

The Evolving Role Of Conservation

Kazakhstan’s remarkable saiga success clearly highlights the changing role of biodiversity restoration. In several cases, protecting critically endangered species can lead to wider ecosystem-level benefits which are not always measured by conventional conservation metrics.

As climate volatility increases and extreme weather events become more frequent, protecting wildlife may no longer be entirely separate from climate adaptation. In some cases, the animals themselves can be part of the crucial infrastructure required.

As such, conservation metrics and research need to evolve accordingly, to take into account second and third-order effects of restoring these key species and attract greater support and funding.