Forest and Landscape: A New Educational Route Will Demonstrate Their Interconnection and Interdependence

The Silver Taiga Foundation employees have started the development of a new educational route aimed at the demonstration of the forest and landscape interdependence in the process of a common evolution and an impact of the human activity on the landscape change.

Why is it needed and who needs it? The fact is that the human economic activities can lead and often lead to undesirable and even catastrophic changes in the landscape. The most striking recent example is the disappearance of the Aral Sea and its transformation into a saline desert. The forest use without regard to the special features of the landscape can also result in the changes of the area hydrological regime, rivers shallowing, small streams drying-out. To avoid this as much as possible one needs to learn how to properly plan the forestry on the landscape basis.

But what is the landscape? Everybody has his/her own understanding, and even the landscape specialists have several conceptions of this notion. One of the objectives of the route under development is to provide a visual presentation of the landscape.

The major difficulty here is a spatial scale: it’s impossible to see the forest landscape on a limited territory. It is possible to show how the forest ecosystems consistently change from one to another depending on the landscape only on quite a vast space. Therefore, the length of a new route (in contrast to the existing walking educational routes in the Komi Model Forest) is 60 kilometers. It will be located on the Sedka river watershed. The floodplains, pine-forest terraces above the flood-plain, a river macroslope, and a watershed part where the river begins will be represented on the route. It is important to show how each part of this watershed landscape contributes both to the river and forest condition. That’s the very reason why the forest is naturally different on various parts of the landscape – on the floodplain, terrace, and watershed…

Seven demonstration points of the future route were selected and laid during the field expedition conducted last week. A reconnaissance has been conducted, the most striking points typical for this very landscape element have been selected, their first description, including the soil profile cuts, has been made, the material for characteristics of the different forest areas has been collected. Space images, topographic, forest, and landscape maps will be used for the more complete description and representation of the route.

– We hope that this route will be the basis for a new training course on the landscape planning of the forest use, – the Silver Taiga director Yuri Pautov comments. – For such planning it is important to understand that it’s not only the landscape that affects the forest, but also the forest influences the landscape change. Therefore, the route has to demonstrate not only the natural forest change under the landscape influence, but also the landscape changes as affected by a man, including the forest use consequences. Figuratively speaking, the forest is sort of a landscape skin. The human skin is different on different parts of the body, and the results of its damage are also different depending on the body part. However, it is a well-known fact that the damage of the skin on some parts can result in very serious undesirable and even irreversible consequences. Same is valid for the forest landscape. So, there is no need to modify the nature, we need to learn to understand its patterns and try to follow the natural processes, grasping the wisdom of nature.

Valentina Semyashkina
Translated by Irina Sokolova