The Kopet Dag semi-desert spans the border country between southwestern Turkmenistan and northeastern Iran, occupying the transition zone where the lowland deserts give way to the foothills of the Kopet Dag Mountains. Its vegetation is dominated by sagebrushes and white wormwood, with bulbous bluegrass and desert sedge mixed among many other plants of the Artemisia and Seriphidium genera, though much of the terrain is sparsely vegetated clay and loess desert dotted with takyrs, smooth pans of hard, cracked clay. The climate is cold semi-arid (Köppen BSk), with at least one winter month averaging below freezing and precipitation reaching only about 200 mm per year. Its flagship animal is the Turkmenian ratel, an endangered honey badger subspecies endemic to Turkmenistan, and the plains also shelter striped hyena, caracal, Pallas's cat, and reintroduced kulan, a subspecies of Asiatic wild ass. Conservation coverage is minimal, with only a small portion of Iran's Golestan National Park reaching into the ecoregion.

At a glance

About the deserts & xeric shrublands biome

Arid and semi-arid lands where low, erratic rainfall and high evaporation limit vegetation to drought-adapted shrubs, succulents, and sparse grasses. Day-to-night temperature swings are large, and life is finely tuned to water scarcity.

Catalog plants suited to this ecoregion

Computed from each plant's stated USDA zone range against this ecoregion's CHELSA-derived current zone range, with the CHELSA mid-century warming delta applied for the projection. Plants whose stated range falls outside both the current and projected zone end up dropped; the rest land in one of the three buckets below.

Collections for this ecoregion

No curated collection's plants all fit this ecoregion's zone range. We surface a collection only when every member would grow here — partial fits get filtered out rather than mislead. As the catalog and the curated set both grow, this section will fill in.

Related ecoregions