Mongolia is a land of vast and steppe landscapes, which are the primary source of livelihood to highly dispersed groups of nomadic herders. The Eastern Steppe covers 250,000 square kilometers, 10 times the size of the Serengeti in Northern Tanzania, and is home to 200,000 livestock herders. The steppe is also home to diverse and abundant wildlife species, including Mongolian gazelles, Siberian marmot, grey wolf, red fox, corsac fox, white-naped crane, swan goose, and whooper swan.

Historically, the combination of low population density and rich traditional knowledge of how to manage the steppe landscapes have allowed herders to live successfully, with a high degree of food security and a rich cultural heritage.

In recent decades, the steppe has come under threat from factors that strain herder capacity to manage them, because they operate on scales and involve technical complexities that are difficult to address using traditional knowledge and management practices. These include large-scale mining and agricultural development areas for natural resources and climate change impacts.

WCS began working with herder communities to help them monitor wildlife populations that are important to their livelihoods and cultural identity. Though herder groups greatly appreciated and valued WCS support, their nomadic lifestyle and the vastness of the steppe made it difficult to maintain frequent and extended interaction normally required to develop and implement conservation strategies that built on long-term wildlife monitoring data.

In an attempt engage herder communities more regularly in environmental resilience discussions WCS partnered with the Nomadic Nature Conservation (NNC), a Mongolian NGO, to develop the Nomadic Nature Trunk curriculum. The first Nomadic Trunk program was launched, in 2007, in the Eastern Steppe region, with start-up funding from WCS.

Each trunk contains a portable, self-contained conservation education curriculum consisting of 20-23 lessons covering topics such as climate adaptation, community participation, animal relationships, habitat, biodiversity, predator and prey links, waste management, water quality and human-wildlife conflict. The traveling trunk contains materials for use in lessons that are entertaining, interactive, and demonstrate the connections linking the whole ecosystem in ways that are accessible for people of all ages, from children to elders. Most importantly WCS and the NNC have trained trainners such as community leaders, environemtnal profesionals and teachers to use the materials in the trunks. Now, most herder communities, Protected Areas and schools in the Eastern Steppe and Southern Gobi regions of Mongolia, use and share the trunks.

The Nomadic Nature Trunk Program complements the conservation work of WCS, by educating communites on ecological issues and providing solutions to the new challenges they face living on the steppe landscape.

The program also provides opportunities for community members to engage one another on critical environmental issues that affect their liveihoods and way of life, and substantially extends the impacts of participatory conservation activities undertaken when WCS field staff are present.