by Curtis Runyan

(Washington, DC, March 2003) In 2001, when the conservation group Global Forest Watch Canada wanted to map the country’s vast boreal forests, they turned to the Russians. Using whatever means available in the past decade, Dima Aksenov and Alexey Yaroshenko have been mapping Russia’s northern forests, deciphering the rapid rate at which they are being logged.

In doing so, they have become the boreal forest mapping experts – despite shoe-string budgets, government roadblocks, and their rodent-plagued basement office in Moscow. While a number of organizations now make maps with computerized geographic information systems (GIS), Aksenov, Yaroshenko, and their teams are in high demand.

They got their start in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when copy machines and access to mapping data were hard to come by. To this day many state maps remain locked away from public view, but Aksenov was able to borrow forest service maps through contacts at the local environment office.

The group used tracing paper and colored pens to copy the maps. “We were looking at maps, tracing them, and transferring the information by hand, coloring in everything,” said Aksenov, who spoke at a recent conference in Washington, DC. The conference, convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, DC, brought together mapping experts from Canada, Russia, the United States, Finland, and Sweden. The group is planning to release a comprehensive map of all the large tracts of wilderness remaining in the northern forests.

In the early 1990s, Aksenov and other members of the Student Corps for Nature Conservation – one of the country’s only independent conservation groups at that time – used their hand-drawn maps to launch a campaign to protect old-growth forests in Murmansk Oblast, in the Russian northwest beyond the Arctic Circle. After nearly a decade of negotiations, the government caved in to public pressure and is soon expected to protect a large area of the Murmansk’s old-growth forests.

What began as a one-time map-making operation expanded in the mid-1990s when German and Scandinavian environmental groups asked the Russians to make maps of the forests in the Republic of Karelia, which is just south of Murmansk. The groups were kicking off a campaign to pressure European companies like Finnish Enso (today Swedish-Finnish StoraEnso) and UPM-Kummene to stop buying old-growth timber from the Karelian forests.

The maps, which revealed the rapid rate at which the forests were being destroyed, hit a nerve with consumers in Europe, which pressured Enso in 1996 to announce a moratorium on logging old-growth forests in the Karelia and Murmansk Regions. Other big companies followed suit. “Some of the world’s largest companies announced they would be guided by our maps when buying logs from Karelia and Murmansk,” said Aksenov.

But making maps by hand was a huge task. “We got tired of redrawing these maps by hand every time we made a small change,” said Aksenov. “Our colleagues from the scientific community in Moscow already used GIS in their work. But for advocacy groups this technology was too expensive.” About that time ESRI, a U.S.-based software company, offered to donate its GIS programs to them. With basic equipment and rudimentary training, the mapmakers determined to chart all of Russia’s northern European forests.

In 1999, the Taiga Rescue Network, a coalition of groups from Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia working to protect boreal forests, set out to map all of Northern Europe’s old-growth forests. When the network compiled its data, the Russian team turned out to be the only group capable of transforming the material into a GIS map.

When WRI set up its Global Forest Watch initiative in Russia in 1999, Yaroshenko was developing a ground-breaking approach to mapping boreal forests using satellite images. Aksenov and Yaroshenko stepped in to become the new organization’s backbone. Armed with a grant from the home furnishings company IKEA, Global Forest Watch Russia began working to identify and map all remaining large blocks of intact forest in Russia – a huge task, given the country’s 289 million hectares of forest. The maps would allow timber companies to steer clear of old-growth forests and pressure government authorities to protect wild areas.

Even with some international funding, their Russian ingenuity was put to the test. They were able to purchase and barter for only a handful of the expensive high-resolution satellite images needed to build the maps, so they started with topographical maps and cheaper lower-resolution images to identify obvious disturbances, and bought high-resolution images for the remaining areas. The result was published in 2002: The Atlas of Russia’s Intact Forest Landscapes.

“IKEA is now using our atlas” to avoid buying timber from old-growth forests, says Misha Karpachevsky, of the Biodiversity Conservation Center, another member of Global Forest Watch in Russia. But government officials remain stuck in a Soviet mindset, says Yaroshenko.

“They don’t even think whether they will be able to earn more money, they just want to log more,” he said. (WRI Features, 864 words)

Source: Greenpeace Russia