The territory of Yakutia occupies a significant part of the planet's North and plays important role in formation and dynamics of the planet's climate. It is a free biosphere reservoir. Yakutia's territory discharges the functions of the global scale. At the same time, Yakutia is a constituent part of the one circumpolar ecological space, and has a number of specific natural climatic factors, which influence the directions, scales and types of economic development, nature use and environmental protection.
As the result of the constant growth of the global population, forests reduce and many other human activities, disastrous floods, happen more and more often.
The problems of human-caused catastrophes, disastrous floods, and forest fires are topical to our Republic, too.
Ecological monitoring is among the priority aspects of the activity of Nature Protection Ministry of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).
The major objective of the ecological monitoring is to provide the governing organs, industrial enterprises, agricultural sector, and society with the information on ecological situation in the territory of the region, as well as to model the economic settling of the region.
Nature Protection Ministry is equipped with modern technical machinery, software, and highly skilled staff. The ministry's tasks are: analysis, systematization of the ecological information, creation and support of data base, keeping of reference data banks of the ecological monitoring, environment condition prediction and drawing out recommendations on protective measures realization.
Systematization and complex analysis of the monitoring data is realized with wide use of geoinformation system technology, use of sounding data and systems of data base control.
Specialists of Nature Protection Ministry designed and realized the data base of the natural environment components as a major element of the territorial geoinformational system of ecological monitoring. The data base containing the information on potentially dangerous territories that lie in the zone of flooding.
But we consider a wider range of factors that influence the environment condition as well as the possibility of emergency situations in the Republic.
The data base of Nature Protection Ministry provides information on unwooded spaces, fire-sites, geochemistry, geophysics, human-caused pollutions of snow cover.
For example, the migration of roe deer – the species that exist in the Northern part of its habitat – whose vulnerability depends on the height of the snow cover – is a symptom of the growing risk of the spring flood, because the snow reserves influence the spring flood passing.
In the process of work we use electronic map with the scale 1:1000 000 for the whole of the Republic and shooting scanner MODIS (from the American satellite Terra).
High quality remote sounding details are necessary for carrying out ecological monitoring of the natural environment, like floods on the rivers. Because of the fact that most settlements in the Republic are situated near different water bodies, mostly rivers, many of them are vulnerable to floods. Oil-tanks can be found close to the settlements because oil is transported by water. With the use of deciphered air-space data on the processes it would be possible to watch the flood zones and detect the possibility of oil reservoirs leakages and damages. Nature Protection Ministry is working actively to expand international cooperation. This year, the specialist of Nature Protection Ministry of Yakutia was selected as the leader of a working group of the Northern Forum on floods.
The government of Yakutia considered the Bill called “Ecological Monitoring” and passed it on to Il Tuman for approval. This draft determines the main directions of work, methods, forms and mechanisms of creation and effective functioning of ecological monitoring system in the Republic
The system is open and compatible with already functioning systems of monitoring, which embrace different activities. This significantly increases the effectiveness of the managing decisions taken.
In this connection, it seems reasonable to us to consider the interaction of Monitoring services of Yakutia with the corresponding structures of the Arctic Council.
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