Abstract: China is one of the countries which have been most seriously affected by desertification in the world. For nearly half a century, China has continued to regard desertification prevention and control as an important development strategy for protecting the ecological security of the land and the stability of production. Presently, via continuous exploration and research combined with major ecological engineering projects, several successful desertification control models have been developed in the northern desertification areas. However, the current research still lacks a systematic classification and generalization scheme for the types of governance models sharing common characteristics. Furthermore, a lack of integration and analysis from the macro-strategic level has led to insufficient guidance for the research results. In this study, literature review and induction were used to comprehensively summarize the current research status of China's desertification control models, which were then divided into five types. These five types are as follows: the comprehensive management mode of grassland ecological protection and ecological construction, the combination mode of ecological sand fixation projects and water-saving irrigation technology, the integrated development mode of characteristic sand industry and forest and fruit industries, the multi-compound ecological industrial mode of agriculture-forest-herding-grass, and the development mode of courtyard ecological economy and ecological manor economy. According to the classification system, each representative model was then selected, and the technical principle, basic characteristics, industrial chain structure, and implementation effect of each model were analyzed in depth, thus providing a reference for selecting a desertification governance path with regional characteristics that is suitable to local conditions.

Key words: sand prevention and control, governance model, pattern classification, technical approach, sand industry