Abstract: The impact of infrastructure construction and operation of a wind farm on the vegetation was investigated in Jingtai County, Gansu Province, China. The results show that, the loss of direct vegetation productivity caused by the construction of 100MW wind farms in desert steppe region is 6.79 g·m^-2·a^-1, and the loss of indirect vegetation productivity is 91.43 g·m^-2·a^-1. As the degree of disturbance increases, the species richness decreases and the uniformity decreases. After the project running, about nearly 10 years of natural recovery, although the core disturbed zone has a single species, the vegetation productivity is more than twice that of the secondary disturbed zone, which is about 50% and 33% of the indirect disturbance zone and the undisturbed zone. The vegetation productivity in the indirect disturbed zone is only 50% of the undisturbed zone. In general, the impact of wind power project disturbance on regional vegetation is not only the complete loss of vegetation productivity in the local area during the construction period, but more importantly, the large scale reduction of vegetation productivity in the large area indirect affected area during the operation period, and this effects are long term and continuous.

Key words: wind farm, vegetation productivity, biodiversity, desert steppe region