The total area of Karakum pastures in Turkmenistan is up to 39 million hectares, covering 77,5% of the country's territory. The Caspian region is particularly promising for livestock farming, according to the newspaper "Neutral Turkmenistan."

Rational use and protection of pasture lands is a task outlined in the National Program for Socio-Economic Development of Turkmenistan for 2011–2030.

To preserve pastures and improve their efficiency, staff from the National Institute of Deserts, Flora, and Fauna (NIDFFA) of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of Turkmenistan are analyzing dominant pasture vegetation species and developing inventory methods for tree, shrub, and herbaceous flora in these areas.

The work of Turkmen scientists is consistent with such a modern scientific direction as remote sensing of the Earth – using geographic information systems.

Specialists from the Research Institute of Plant Protection and Flora, together with scientists from the Geoinformation Systems Laboratory of the International Scientific and Technological Park of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan, spent several years compiling a spectral library of pasture plant species within the boundaries of the Turkmen Lake “Altyn Asyr” and the Caspian Lowland. To do this, hyperspectral satellite images were deciphered, and the spectra of specific plants in clusters were identified based on their chemical composition. From this data, a collection of spectra of key plants was created.

In total, the "library" collection contains spectral characteristics of approximately thirty dominant pasture plant species. This allows, based on the decoding of a recent satellite image of the studied surface, to remotely census flora species, determine the degree of vegetation and plant density, and calculate the forage value of the pastures of the Karakum Desert and the Kopetdag hills.