The ecoregion stretches from the Caspian Sea coast in the west nearly to the Pamir-Alay Mountains in the east. It encompasses the coastal plains of the Caspian, the Krasnovodsk and Ustyurt plateaus of northwestern Turkmenistan, the sprawling Karakum Desert of central Turkmenistan, and the Kyzylkum Desert of eastern Uzbekistan extending into a portion of southern Kazakhstan between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers. The Amu Darya bisects the region, its thin corridor of riparian woodland cutting a green line through the otherwise tan and gray landscape. This river, one of Central Asia's great waterways, has shaped human settlement and ecological diversity for millennia.

Soil determines everything here. In sandy areas, white saxaul and black saxaul trees anchor the dunes with root systems that reach far deeper than their modest canopies suggest. These short, drought-tolerant trees are the closest thing the Karakum has to forests. Where the sand thins into loamy soil, sagebrush and salt-tolerant saltworts take over. The most inhospitable terrain, the saline solonchak soils, supports only salt-adapted succulent shrubs. The plant communities shift abruptly with soil chemistry, creating a patchwork landscape that looks uniform from altitude but reveals its complexity at ground level.

The desert's wildlife has evolved for a climate that swings between winter months averaging below freezing and summer temperatures that punish anything without shade or a burrow. Long-eared hedgehogs and Brandt's hedgehogs forage at dusk. Tolai hares sprint across the hardpan. Ten species of jerboas, those improbable leaping rodents, have carved out separate niches across the ecoregion, each adapted to slightly different terrain and food sources. Gerbils are everywhere. The reptile count is exceptional for a desert this far north: the milder winters compared to the Central Asian northern desert to the north allow species to persist that could not survive further into the continental interior.

Three reserves anchor conservation efforts across this vast region. The Gaplangyr Nature Reserve occupies a spur of the Ustyurt Plateau in the northwest, protecting one of Central Asia's most remote desert landscapes. The Repetek Biosphere State Reserve, established in the eastern Karakum Desert for the study of desert ecological recovery, shelters desert monitors and the vulnerable goitered gazelle. Farthest south, the Badhyz State Nature Reserve protects populations of ungulates including the onager, or Asiatic wild ass — the Turkmenian subspecies is classified as Endangered — one of the rarest large mammals in Central Asia. These protected areas are islands of relative stability in a region where overgrazing, irrigation-driven salinization, and the ongoing consequences of the Aral Sea disaster continue to reshape the ecosystem.