Preliminary study on ecological sand fixation effect of biopolymers

Desertification control is a global challenge. Compared to traditional desert sand fixation techniques, biopolymers as environmentally friendly solidification materials can not only effectively bond desert sand to resist wind erosion, but also improve its growth promoting properties to promote plant growth, ultimately achieving permanent sand fixation. Based on the aforementioned ideas, this paper studied the ecological sand fixation effects of xanthan gum (XG), guar gum (GG), and their equal mass mixed gum (MG) through surface hardness test, water retention performance test, and plant growth test. The surface hardness test shows that biopolymers can effectively bond desert sand particles. XG, GG, and MG solutions with a mass fraction of 0.1% increase the surface pressure strength of desert sand by 9.4, 5.3, and 8.0 times, respectively; The water retention performance test shows that the improvement effect of biopolymers on the water retention performance of desert sand increases with the increase of solution mass fraction. Moreover, under high temperature curing conditions at 40℃, the comparative results of the growth promoting properties of the three biopolymers are: XG>MG>GG; Plant growth experiments have shown that under indoor conditions, biopolymers can shorten plant emergence time, increase plant emergence rate and seedling height, and significantly improve the growth promoting performance of desert sand. The preliminary research in this article indicates that the use of biopolymers for ecological sand fixation is theoretically feasible.