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Brief Overview of the Dnipro Basin Forests
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1. Brief overview of the Dnipro basin forests
The Dnipro Basin area covers 503.5 thousand square kilometers. It occupies a central position amongst other river basins in the territory of Ukraine (305.2 thousand square km, or 50.6% of the country’s total land area) and Belarus (116.4 thousand square km, or 56.1% of the country’s total area). It lies in the west of the European part of the Russian Federation (81.9 thousand square km, or 0.5% of the country’s total area).
Forests constitute one of the main landscape and environment forming components of the Dnipro Basin. They cover 124.8 thousand square km of its territory, including 46.7 thousand square km in the Belorussian part of the basin (40.1% of the area), 26.9 thousand square km in the Russian part (27.2% of the basin area) and 51.2 thousand square km in the Ukrainian part of the basin (16.8% of the area). The average percentage of forest area is 24.8%.
One of the three basin countries’ major natural resources, forests perform a number of extremely important environmental functions, namely those of water protection, soil preservation and climate regulation. Forests are a natural habitat for the most part of land biota. They provide necessary conditions for numerous species of plants, mushrooms and fungi, algae and animals (both vertebrate and invertebrate).
Forest growing conditions in the basin are determined by the geo-morphological structure of the territory, its soil continuum and climate. They vary within a fairly broad range: from conditions favourable for the formation of southern-taiga phytocoenoses (plant communities) dominated by fir and pine trees in the northern part of the basin, to those auspicious for highly productive mixed coniferous-and-broadleaved forests in Belorussian and Ukrainian Polessye with their fauna and flora diversity, for pine and oak forests in Ukrainian forest-steppe zone adjusted to unstable water regime, and, finally, for isles of forests in steppe ravines and flood-plains in the central and southern steppe, and mountainous forests with beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), spruce and silver fir (Abies alba L.) on the foothills and eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains.
The Dnipro River being 2,285 km long, the latitude projection of its stream from the north to the south is about 1,040 km. According to the forest zoning adopted in the former USSR, the Dnipro River and its tributaries stretch from the north to the east of the Eurasian forest area of the moderate zone (Scandinavian-Russian province) and of Eurasian steppe area (Southern Russian province). The Dnipro flows through 4 natural zones (from the north to the south), namely: the zones of mixed forests and of deciduous forests, forest-steppe and steppe zones.
Coniferous trees dominate in the basin forest vegetation (55.3% of area). The most common are pine (Pinus silvestris L.) forests: they make up 48.6% of the Dnipro Basin forests. The share of the European fir (Picea abies Karst.) is also noticeable in the northern part of the basin, in particular, in Smolensk (25.9%), Vitebsk (23.2%), Mogiliov (16.5%), Minsk (13.0%) oblasts, and on the eastern slopes of the Carpathian mountains (21.3% in Lviv oblast).
Smolensk oblast is unique for the basin in that it has a big share (62.5%) of derivative small-leaved species of birch (Betula pendula Roth.), aspen (Populus tremula L.), gray alder (Alnus incana (L.) Moench) in its forests, which is the result of felling native coniferous and broad-leaved forests in the past and replacing them with fast growing pioneer species: birch, aspen and gray alder. The share of small-leaved species in the basin forests amounts to 30.0%, of which 7.0% is made up by native black alder forests on marshes (eutrophic bogs) and river flood-lands.
Further southwards, broad-leaved species (oak, ash, maple) compete with pine. In Lviv and Ternopil oblasts, beech is rather common, too. The overall share of forests with dominating hard-leaved species is as small as 13.6% of the forest-covered basin area, while in the forest-steppe and steppe zones oak stand constitutes the major part of forest vegetation. Oak dominates in the forests of Oriol, Kursk, Belgorod oblasts of the Russian part of the basin, as well as in Khmelnytsky, Ternopil, Kharkiv, Cherkassy, Vynnytsia, Kirovograd, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts of Ukraine. On the whole, the share of oak forests in the Ukrainian part of the basin is 20.9% of the forest-covered basin area, as compared to 12% of such area in the entire basin.
Forests with predominant ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.) communities are characteristic of the flood-plains of the basin rivers. Their share in the forest-covered area is 0.9%.
Shrubs occupy over 1% of the forest-covered basin area. These consist of various species of willow (Salix sp.) on transitional (mesotrophic) bogs, marshes (eutrophic bogs) and river flood-plains, as well as of juniper (Juniperus communis L.) on sandy soils.
Fig. 1.1. Forest coverage (%) of the Dnipro Basin territory (by oblasts and raions)
