Field Works on the Mezen River Tributaries
Following the investigations of the loggings’ impact on the river ecosystems, the Silver Taiga ecologists have conducted field works at the headwaters of the Mezen river – on its tributaries Kuzhim and Nizhnaya Puzla. Several dozens of samples of benthos and plankton taken from different areas of these water streams are forwarded for analyses to the Laboratory of Ichthyology and Hydrology of the Department of Animal Ecology, Institute of Biology of the Komi Scientific Center of Ural Branch of RAS – one of the Silver Taiga partners in the implementation of this project.
– This is another expedition in the series of expeditions that we organize for the environmental assessment of the loggings’ impact on water and biological resources of rivers, – the ecologist Nikolay Shilov says. – Why namely these two tributaries? They are interesting from the point of further comparison of the results: the Kuzhim is a very logged water stream, almost 50% of the forests in the basin of this river are logged; the Nizhnaya Puzla, on the contrary, suffered a little from the loggings (just 4% of the forests are logged here). It is important to find out how much the condition of water and biological resources of these rivers differ from each other because of this.
Except taking samples, we had another task – an assessment review of the situation on the Kuzhim river. During a six-hour rafting along this river, we had the opportunity to make visual estimation of the degree of disturbances and conditions of fish reproduction. It has to be sad that these are mainly the river areas with adjacent roads and bridges that get sanded, but in general, we got the impression that the reproduction conditions are good. At the same time, unfortunately, along the entire length of the rafting we have not seen any grayling. It is most likely that the fish population is severely depleted due to overfishing. Besides, this is a side effect of the economic activities.
Students Dmitry Gromov (Syktyvkar State University), Tatyana Dyukova (University of Eastern Finland), and a volunteer Sergey Belousov have taken part in the field works on the tributaries of the Mezen together with the Silver Taiga staff.