Thursday, January 19, the first meeting of the Academic Board approved the plan of events for the Year of Ecology and the anniversary of the system of Specially Protected Natural Areas (SPNA) with the new Board members.

The meeting of the Academic Board of the Prioksko-Terrasny Reserve started the new jubilee year of 2017 with the new members of the Board. Such a job rotation of the Academic Board is held every two years due to the change in the team of the Academic Department, as well as constant changes of scientific agenda and members of scientific and research organizations, who work on the territory of the reserve. New members of the Academic Board came from three new institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences: the Institute of Geography, A.N. Severtsev Institute of the Problems of Ecology and Evolution and the Institute of Fundamental Biology Problems.

The main issue of the first meeting of the Academic Board was to assess and approve a plan of scientific research and technical work (the SRW plan) for 2017. Considering the fact that the upcoming year was declared as the Year of the SPNA’s anniversary and the Year of Ecology, the Academic Department had prepared a plan rich with different events.

The members of the Academic Board supported the initiative of developing a geographic information system based on a GIS web-service and creating an account of the reserve in the Internet. The head of NextGIS, the company dealing with such kinds of projects, Maxim Dubinin presented the opportunities of modern web-services and geo-technologies to the participants of the meeting. Such technologies allow the participants of joint projects to use the unified GIS of the reserve and to add the layers of the system in real time.

The reserve’s list of plans for the jubilee year includes preparing the publications of the annotated bird list of the Biosphere Reserve, the illustrated album of spider diversity on the territory of the reserve (282 identified species) and, also, the seventh new issue of academic papers of the reserve.

The SRW plan for 2017, corrected and approved by the Academic Board, will be signed by the head of the reserve and published on the reserve’s website.

Other topics from the meeting’s agenda:

– the results of the monitoring of climate changes and the reserve eco-systems’ reaction to climate change;

– the results of many years of observation of the ungulate population dynamics, which prove the thesis of non-expediency of these animals’ population regulation in the reserve;

– the non-expediency of saving wild crop sectors and the necessity of regular haying in meadow-steppe vegetation sectors;

– other research and practical life aspects of the reserve.

The next meeting is scheduled to March. It will be devoted to hearing of research reports for 2016 and the new plan of forest management and protection.

Get to know the new members of the Academic Board.