Major Threats to Biological and Landscape Diversity Posed by Forestry Management and Use

7. Major threats to biological and landscape diversity posed by forestry management and use

The most common problems posing threats to the conservation of forest flora, fauna and landscape diversity in the Dnipro Basin are as follows:

1. The lack or deficiency, in the forest industry legislative framework, of norms directly providing for the need to conserve and develop biological and landscape diversity, to apply the principles of sustainable forestry management and use.

2. Considerable area of land ineffectively drained in the course of forest hydro-technical amelioration or dried as the result of agricultural land drainage in the forests, which increases forest fire risks and probability of forest stand destruction by biotic and abiotic factors (Belorussian and Ukrainian Polessye, Smolensk and Briansk oblasts).

3. Transfer into the state forest reserve of considerable areas of abandoned peat mines and low fertility lands removed from agricultural use where forest restoration and forest growing is difficult (all territory of the Belorussian part of the basin) but the fires are frequent.

4. Unsatisfactory practices, low economic efficiency and inconsistency of forest use in a great part of forests managed by agricultural enterprises or located on reserve lands.

5. Critically low percentage of forest area in separate administrative units in the northern and central parts of the basin, and entire regions in the forest-steppe and steppe zones; high fragmentation of forest areas.

6. Slow introduction of forest certification in the forest industries of the three countries conditioned by the industry personnel’s lack of understanding of the forest certification phenomenon, insufficient activity of the state power bodies and NGOs in this sphere. Shortage of available information in the national languages.

7. Slow introduction in the forest industry of systems, methods and techniques facilitating the conservation of biotope diversity (dead timber, brushwood, micro-biotopes, target specially protected areas, etc).

8. Undeveloped (or underdeveloped) landscape and basin-wide approaches in designing, planning and organizing forestry management and use activities.

9. Absolute domination of final main felling in the system of forest use.

10. Lack of an integrated approach to the forest use organization with due regard of the necessity to conserve biological and landscape diversity.

11. Occasional transformation of selective sanitary felling into commercial field ones.

12. Increasingly frequent explosions of forest pests populations and spread of forest diseases due to the deteriorating climate conditions, weakened sustainability of tree mono-species, low efficiency of the forest protection system. This problem pertains, in particular, to Polessye administrative-territorial complex of the Russian Federation where the planting of mono-species pine forests with low biological sustainability on vast areas led to a massive infestation of tree plantations with pine fungus, especially on old-arable soils, and, eventually, to their degradation.

13. Dominating trend to grow coniferous species and reduce the areas with broadleaved plantations, orientation towards creating mono-species forests.

14. Absence of theoretically substantiated practice of growing uneven-aged forest stands and insufficient participation of mixed stands.

15. Forest enterprises’ lacking materials on populations of rare and endangered plant and animal species and their disregarding the need to conserve these populations.

16. Untimely receipt of information on the changing state of forests and its evaluation on the regional level because of the absence of a forest monitoring system or its operation at a lower capacity that the rated one (refers, primarily, to the Russian part of the basin and, to a lesser extent, to the Ukrainian and Belorussian ones).

17. Degradation of a considerable part of protection forest plantations in Ukraine, Kursk, Belgorod and Oriol oblasts of the Russian Federation leading to the loss of functional properties of these plantations and their biota diversity.

18. Repeated regrowth having an adverse impact on the oak forest sustainability in the forest-steppe zone of the Russian and Ukrainian parts of the basin, which, coupled with the damage from forest pests and diseases, in potential critical situations can cause their massive drying.

19. Low share of old-age (mature and overmature) plantations in the forest reserve of the majority of the basin regions.

20. Critically high recreational load (pressure) on certain forest areas, especially those linked with rivers and water-bodies, and especially in the Ukrainian part of the basin.

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