Current Efforts:

Kamchatka's Central Valley, Landsat 7 satellite data with digital topography added.

The majority of our work at The Woods Hole Research Center within Russia is now going into understanding current land cover and how that has changed over time.  We are trying to understand the role Russian forests play in the global carbon cycle and  historically how humans and climate have changed atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic sources and sinks of this carbon.  Our program has three major components.

Dr. Igor Olennikov in Woods Hole

Russian Visiting Scholars Program

The first of these is to enable Russian forest ecologists to use contemporary techniques of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) through a unique visiting scholars program. The introduction and development of these technologies will assist Russian scientists in the management, characterization, and measurement of their forest resources.  

Forest and Land cover Data of Russia and The Former Soviet Union CD-ROM

Forest and Land cover CD (click for data access)

Second, with direct involvement of our Russian colleagues, we intend to maintain a land use and land cover database for Russian land management. In 2001, we released the Forest and Land cover Data of Russia and the Former Soviet Union CD-ROM. The digital data presented here provide a unique collection of products from geographic information system (GIS) data sets to references on GIS, remote sensing, and Russia- related web sites. This disk is an important step in making spatially explicit environmental and various geographic information for the former USSR more available to researchers.   Over time we continue to strive towards a current and comprehensive database of Russia bio-geographic data sets, while expanding our library of available satellite data.  This data are now available through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

Changes in Terrestrial Carbon Storage in Russia as a Result of Recent Disturbances and Land-Use Change

Data Schematic for Carbon Prediction moving from Forest stands (videls) to MODIS reflectance

The third major component to our efforts in Russia involves developing our understanding of the global carbon cycle, and how Russian Forests can affect changes in atmospheric chemistry, soil chemistry and respiration and global climate change .   With such a large fraction of the world forests, Russia holds vast stocks of trapped carbon.   The future of this carbon remains uncertain as management and mismanagement of the resources changes over time and as global warming proceeds.  Under the Kyoto protocol, it remains in Russia’s best interest to account for their current and potential carbon sequestration capabilities, yet data to quantify these stocks remains unclear.   We are currently involved with the Land Cover and Land Use Change program at NASA trying to quantify and develop carbon accounting models for these forests. A paper on this topic has been submitted.

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2007