Russia, Russian Federation, abbreviation RF, Russian Federation, officially Russian Rossiskaja Federazija, state in Eastern Europe and North Asia (Siberia and Far East), with (2018) 144.5 million residents and 17 098 250 km 2 largest state in the world; The capital is Moscow.
According to campingship, almost 50% of Russia’s area is forest-covered. Tundra, swamps, lakes and high mountains take up around a quarter of the area.
Most of the Arctic archipelagos are located in the belt of the polar cold deserts, as is the north of the Taimyr peninsula and parts of the Anadyr Mountains. The tundra zone, which stretches in a 50 km (in the European part) to 300 km (in the Asian part) wide strip from west to east, almost always has a continuous vegetation cover of lichens, mosses, dwarf birches, dwarf shrubs, deciduous subshrubs and perennial grasses. Between the northern tree line and the northern limit of the contiguous coniferous forest lies the belt of the forest tundra, which is over 100 km wide, in the northern part of which the tundra is interspersed with forest islands and forest strips in the valleys, while in the southern part the predominant forest alternates with open tundra areas. The northern tree line, which is formed by conifers everywhere, runs just north of the Arctic Circle in European Russia; on the Kola Peninsulait extends much further north and reaches at the Norwegian border between 70 ° and 72 ° north latitude, in Siberia it fluctuates between 70 ° and 72 ° north latitude, towards the Pacific coast it stretches on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula to 59 ° 30 ′ Back.
The boreal coniferous forest zone (taiga), the north-south extent of which increases from west to east, extends in European Russia over 10–12 degrees of latitude, in Asian Russia over 10–25 degrees. It comprises a third of the world’s entire coniferous forest. Two thirds of the coniferous forest belt are in the permafrost area. In the European part of the country it extends as a narrow strip along the coast, which increases rapidly in width beyond the Urals. The topsoil of the permafrost areas, which was thawed during the summer, remains largely swampy, as the rainwater cannot run off underground due to the frozen subsoil. The moors are generally flat over a large area (Siberian swamp taiga). The forests are species-poor and uniform over huge areas. They consist primarily of spruce, larch, fir and pine, with birch, poplar, alder and willow as a subordinate part. In the western part of Siberia the coniferous forest (with transitional belts) borders on steppes, in the less continental parts of Europe and in the Amur region it borders on deciduous deciduous forests (with transition zones of mixed coniferous and deciduous forests). In the Far East, large areas of pure deciduous forest dominate the lowlands, especially the Manchurian oak (Quercus liaotungensis). In the floodplains there is a species-rich alluvial forest next to swampy grassland, while deciduous-coniferous mixed forests stretch on the heights. To the west of the Urals, the transition from the coniferous forest to the pure deciduous forest takes place in a very wide mixed forest belt. The pure deciduous forest belt that connects to the south is only narrow in the Eastern European area, the number of hardwood species involved decreases from west to east. East of the Urals is the belt of deciduous forest that extends from Yekaterinburg in the middle Urals extends to near Krasnoyarsk, almost entirely made up of aspen and birch trees.
The European-West Siberian deciduous forest belt gradually merges into the steppe zone in its entire west-east extension to the south. The transition belt is known as the northern meadow steppe or, because of the forest islands that occur here on degraded black earth, also as the forest steppe. The forest steppe belt runs in the European part from Oryol in a flat arc to the north to Ufa, on the other side of the Urals almost parallel to the width in about 55 ° north to Novosibirsk with foothills to the Yenisei. The forest steppe belt is followed in the southwest, in the North Caucasus, by forest-free meadow or black earth steppes (today only available in protected areas, otherwise arable land) and semi-desert on the northwestern edge of the Caspian Sea (Dagestan, Kalmykia and the Astrakhan area). Deciduous forests are characteristic of the lower elevations of the western Great Caucasus.
Between 1990 and 2017, the number and area of nature reserves increased significantly; At the end of 2016 there were 103 nature reserves with a total area of 273,900 km 2; 49 large protected areas with a total area of 106,500 km 2 have the status of national parks. The graded system of protected areas covers a little more than 7% of the territory of Russia, making it one of the largest systems of protected areas in the world.
