Soil Carbon in the Forests of Russia

boreal forest, carbon, soil,

Degradation Of Forestland In Land-Use/Cover Patterns Of Russia

By manifesting the response of land to human activity and impacts, degradation of forestland indicates the locations where society is in conflict with sustaining the forest environment. The analysis of land degradation in various land-use/cover patterns of Russia's vast forest zone (about 1050 million ha., or 63% of the country) clearly demonstrates two human-induced problems, inappropriate technology and improper management, causing land degradation on 9% of the territory. The study illustrates the high vulnerability of forest soils (in comparison to steppe grassland soils) after conversion to intensive cultivation. Thus, a balanced combination of forests and cropland has been found to be the most sustainable land use in the forest zone

A New Digital Georeferenced Database of Soil Degradation in Russia

this paper are twofold

The IIASA/LUC Project Georeferenced Database for the former U.S.S.R. Volume 6: Agricultural Regionalization.

The IIASA/LUC georeferenced database for the former U.S.S.R. was created within the framework of the project "Modeling Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Europe and Northern Asia" (LUC). For Russia, essential information on relief, soil, vegetation, land cover and use, etc., for routine environmental analysis was lacking when the LUC project started developing the database. In addition, the environmental data on the former U.S.S.R. which was available occurred in formats (papers, tables, etc.) that in general could not be used with modern information technology, and in particular in model building. In creating the LUC project database, we have established a threefold task: (1) to obtain the relevant information for the LUC project modeling exercises; (2) to develop data which is applicable to modern information technology; (3) to contribute a series of digital databases which could be applied for a number of other specific analyses by the national and international scientific community. In defining the tasks it was agreed to create a set of digital databases which could be handled by geographic information systems (GIS). The full set of georeferenced digital databases was combined into the LUC project's GIS, using ARC/INFO. However, each individual item (physiography, soil, vegetation, etc.) was created as a unique specific digital database, allowing each item to be used separately, depending on users' needs. The complete series of the unique georeferenced digital databases for the territory of the former U.S.S.R. is described in the IIASA/LUC volumes: Volume 1 -- Physiography (landforms, slope conditions, elevations); Volume 2 -- Soil; Volume 3 -- Soil degradation status (Russia); Volume 4 -- Vegetation; Volume 5 -- Land categories; Volume 6 -- Agricultural regionalization