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Project Rationale
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PROJECT RATIONALE
The idea of establishing an eco-network is considered as integral to organising the conservation of landscape and biodiversity and is key to implementing the European strategy aimed at conservation of landscapes and biodiversity (Sofia, 1995). The environmental network being created is viewed as a euronetwork intended to cover the whole European continent. That is why special importance is attached to studies that focus on designing eco-networks that will cover large areas of Europe and will be subsequently integrated into the European eco-network. The importance of these studies increases even further when it comes to transboundary regions. This reasoning provided the basis for the implementation of this Project. The Project focused on two major goals. First of all, it sought to develop principles, legal and regulatory framework and overall strategy for and ways of establishing an eco-network in the transboundary Dnipro River Basin. All this as well as analysis of regional parameters of landscape and biodiversity of the Dnipro Basin provided a methodological basis for the Project second and the main goal: to develop a master diagram of the eco-network for transboundary areas of the Dnipro River Basin.
The urgency of research on the development of an eco-network of the transboundary Dnipro Basin may be explained not only by the significance of this problem both at the European and national level but also by a great number of outstanding issues in this field. Incomplete understanding of these issues impedes efforts to create national eco-networks (Belarus, Russian and Ukraine) or the Dnipro Basin transboundary eco-network and to integrate the latter into the European eco-network. The key issues which require immediate attention include: absence of clearly-defined criteria for locating natural eco-network cores, which are consistent with European standards; gaps in the legal and regulatory framework governing eco-networking, absence of an agreed common strategy for designing an eco-network (particularly at the national level), application of the Basin-wide approach to eco-network designing, and absence of a list of network-building measures ranked on a geographical (regional) basis. Apart from this, enhanced landscape and biodiversity zones which should be looked upon as regional eco-network constituents have still not been identified in the Dnipro Basin. These and a number of other issues were identified as the Project main objectives.
