Forest Club model projects and sites

INTRODUCTION

Taiga - vast, uninterrupted forests, unpassable ancient remoteness, an absence of human dwellings over a great expanse
V.I. Dal. Dictionary of the Living Russian Language (1903).

The boreal region of European Russia used to be regarded as a virtually unlimited storehouse of forest riches, developed or used only to a small extent and largely still "wild." It is still commonly thought that northern European Russia is dominated by old-growth forests and wilderness landscapes. However, even a preliminary assessment shows that the remaining undeveloped parts of the taiga are relatively small and rapidly diminishing (McCloskey, Spalding, 1989; Bryant et al., 1997). Protecting those sections of the taiga landscape that are still intact is therefore a priority issue for the coming decades. A more detailed assessment begun at the end of the 1990's by non-governmental environmental organizations (Aksenov et al., 1999) confirmed that most of the boreal area of Russia has been subjected to severe fragmentation or fundamental transformation as the result of human development.

Fig. 1. Typical Baltic Shield landscape. Karelia Republic. Photo: V. Kantor.

This work is the first attempt to identify remaining intact boreal forest of northern European Russia using high-resolution satellite imagery that allows most forms of human disturbance in natural ecosystems to be directly identified.

The taiga, in the broad sense of the word, consists of an entire complex of very diverse natural ecosystems located in regions dominated by boreal forests. Bogs, lakes, rivers, flood meadows, mountain tundra, rocky outcrops, rich tree stands and other various types of vegetation together form an unified natural complex known as the taiga. In such boreal forest landscapes, individual components are closely connected to each other in a variety of ways. A delineation of intact taiga that limits itself to the forest, without considering other pieces of the larger landscape, is artificial and, in the opinion of the authors, incorrect. The heavily bog-dominated landscapes of Russia's northernmost boreal region, in which forest land is sometimes no more than 20-30 percent of the total area, are no less a part of the taiga than the uninterrupted forests on the well-drained water divides to the south. Equally important components are the complexes of mountains, lakes, bogs, and forests of the Baltic Shield. To separate these areas from the forest when identifying intact areas would be totally artificial.

Fig. 2. Typical taiga mountain landscape. Perm Region. Photo: P. Potapov

In the context of this work we use the term intact forest landscape to mean entire taiga landscapes, only marginally disturbed by human activities, and without regard to the share of forest in these landscapes. By disturbance we mean the direct destruction or fundamental transformation of any particular ecosystem including the fragmentation of natural areas by infrastructure, which disturbs the connections between a particular ecosystem and the other components of the taiga landscape. Thus, by intact forest landscape we understand a seamless whole of natural ecosystems, undivided by elements of infrastructure, in which there are no visible signs of significant human activity. This work is an attempt to identify and delineate intact areas of at least 50,000 hectares with a width no less than 10 kilometers. Before proceeding we should mention a fundamental fact: forests that are absolutely wild and completely unaffected by human development activities no longer exist anywhere in the world. All present day forests display some degree of influence of human civilization, if only from transboundary air pollution or hunting. Ancient forms of human economic activity and land uses such as hunting, clearing of meadows in the vicinity of small rivers, and shifting cultivation, existed and were fairly widely spread over the boreal region of European Russia since the end of the last glaciation. Because these disturbances have a longer history than the current landscapes, we view these activities, as well as the fires directly associated with them, not as anthropogenic disturbances but rather as anthropogenic factors that have formed the ecosystems. On the other hand, modern development activities are of such form and intensity as to create major disturbances in centuries-old equilibrium and destruction of the natural taiga landscape. In this work, all human background disturbances that were considered insignificant with regard to the designation of intactness were explicitly listed. The list includes old forms of development activities that have shaped the taiga during the course of millennia, as well as some current or recent disturbances that we perceived as fairly weak.

The mission of this work was to search the boreal part of European Russia for remaining large areas undisturbed by human development activities. Areas, which in essence retain their natural characteristics.

The authors used the same approach throughout the researched area, trying at each step to be very clear in formulating principles and criteria used. The investigation reveals that remaining intact forest landscapes cover only a small part of northern European Russia (16.3 percent of the investigated region, and 13.8 percent of the entire forest zone). All these areas could, and probably should, become part of the protected areas network of the north, given their capacity to serve as reference areas while independently sustaining their ecological integrity. In this work, the authors have not attempted to suggest any concrete, formal protection scheme for any or all of the delineated areas. This is a task for the future. For the present, the most reasonable, in the mind of the authors, would be to reserve these areas by excluding them from any industrial development or construction of infrastructure until comprehensive decisions on their value and future destiny can be made in a complete and competent manner.

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