Satellite Data Help Preserve the Russian Taiga

03 September 2008, 9:44am

Detection of forests of high conservation value is the primary task of the joint expedition of the WWF Russia and “Transparent World” NGO, which launched its activities in the leased areas of OAO “Primorsky GOK” on August 4. They will use new satellite data received by ScanEx RDC.

The geo-botanical expedition in the north of the Primorye continues the series of activities started in April this year on detection of habitats and distribution locations of rare plants and animals as well as low impacted forests in the operating area of a major timber company of the territory - OAO “Primorsky GOK” - aiming at provision for their further protection. This company entered the process of voluntary forest certification. In July this year it successfully passed the preliminary audit of the forest control system required for receiving the FSC sustainable forest management certificate.

“The expedition will continue through the month. The specialists will find and map locations of rare trees, shrubs and herbs. All of them including established buffer zone will be deleted from the felling plans of forestry activities. This particular expedition features the use of high resolution space imagery data,” says Andrei Purekhovsky, the forest program coordinator of the Amur Branch of WWF Russia.

Along with botanists from Moscow and St Petersburg, the expedition will be attended by the staff of Far East Forestry Institute (DalNIIPKh). Their task will be to check the expediency of fellings, care administered in non-impacted cedar forests, which recently have been used for industrial level felling, including that of an illegal nature.

"Detection of rare plant growing areas is executed on the basis of analysis and field verification of spectrozonal space data received from SPOT (France) and Landsat (USA) satellites. Detection of fellings, especially those of small size and including those of an illegal nature, require imagery of higher resolution” explains Dmitry Aksenov, Deputy Director of “Transparent World” on Ecological Projects, - “2.5-meter resolution images received recently from the Indian satellite Cartosat-1 (IRS-P5) satisfy the need."

There is yet another important point: eventually this will yield a qualified scientific method for detecting forests of high conservation value in the zone of cedar-broadleaf forests, which other Far East forestry companies will be able to use.

Earlier, Transparent World, in conjunction with the Amur Branch of WWF, performed work on detecting areas of highest ecological value, which took place in the area run by OAO “Terneyles” and specifically in the Samarga river valley. Negotiations are held with this forestry company aimed at conserving areas with high conservation value.

Similar work in the European part of Russia was implemented by Transparent World – in the Kirov region together with HGO “Kirov Region Forest Certification Participants", in the Komi Republic together with “Silver Taiga” Fund and forestry company “Mondi”, as well as in Karelia, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions.

Space data required for the above work were provided by Research and Development Center ScanEx.

Materials of NGO Transparent World and WWF Russia were used in writing the article.

www.scanex.com

Geo: International