The database of chemical composition of Central Asian forage plants contains just under 1000 desert and steppe species with information such as Latin and Russian names and family and related records of chemical composition from various sources including percentages by weight of protein, ash, cellulose and fat. Where available, it also includes data on digestible protein content, metabolisable energy and Soviet Feed Units (SFU). Records also include information on the country, location, season or month and phenological phase at time of collection of each sample. As one of the original uses of the database was for modelling food and energy intake by the saiga antelope, it also includes information identifying saiga food plant species along with sources of this information. Data on the edibility of many species for livestock in different seasons are also available. See the detailed documentation available here for more information on the data types, definitions and sources. NB The database is in text format and must be imported e.g. into relational database software, as Unicode (UTF-8) in order to convert the Cyrillic characters in Russian names. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/6a5a9a2a-730b-49f7-9e42-2295040aee56

This dataset records the Saiga antelope die-off and calving sites in Kazakhstan. It represents the locations (and where available dates) of (i) die-offs and (ii) normal calving events in the Betpak-dala population of the saiga antelope, in which three major mass mortality events have been recorded since 1988. In total, the data contains 214 saiga die-off and calving sites obtained from field visits, aerial surveys, telemetry and literature. Locations derived from field data, aerial surveys or telemetry are polygons representing the actual size and shape of the die-off or calving sites; locations sourced from the literature are point data around which buffers of 6km were created, representing the average size of calving aggregations. Of the 214 locations listed, 135 sites for which environmental data were available were used to model the probability of a die-off event. The collection and use of these data are written up in more detail in papers which are currently under review (when published links will be added to this record). Saiga antelope are susceptible to mass mortality events, the most severe of which tend to be caused by haemorrhagic septicaemia following infection by the bacteria Pasteurella multocida. These die-off events tend to occur in May during calving, when saigas gather in dense aggregations which can be represented spatially as relatively small sites. The Betpak-dala population is one of three in Kazakhstan, located in the central provinces of the country (see map). Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/8ad12782-e939-4834-830a-c89e503a298b