Forest plantations around settlements and cultivated lands are of great sanitary and hygienic importance, which is especially significant for newly irrigated lands in Turkmenistan. The greatest land-reclamation efficiency in this respect belongs to field-protective forest belts around irrigated fields, which have a beneficial effect on the course of crop growing. At the same time, a kind of forestry landscape is being created, as, for example, on the old-irrigated and newly developed lands of the Vas, Shasenem and Hanhovuz massifs and the Kopetdag and Koytendag plains.
The network of field-protective forest belts is of great ecological importance for improving the culture of irrigated agriculture and for forming a certain microclimate in the surface layer of the areas adjacent to the fields. Agricultural scientists monitor the moisture regime and seasonal air temperature amplitudes in the fields, including the development and productivity of various crops, primarily wheat and cotton. In the course of the research, it was revealed that, in comparison with the fields protected with the help of forest plantations, the air humidity in open arable land is much lower, which is significant in a sharp continental climate characterised by fluctuations in temperature, an uneven amount of atmospheric precipitation and also strong winds.
