Ural Mountains Taiga

The Ural Mountain Range spans from the arctic tundra in the north to temperate forest and steppes in the south. Between these two biomes lie vast acreages of taiga (boreal forest) at varied elevations within the mountains and across the adjacent foothills and plains. This includes large intact forest landscapes and Europe’s largest remaining primeval forest—the Virgin Komi Forest—as well as second growth forests and severely degraded areas impacted by modern commercial activities such as mining and conversion to agricultural and other land uses. Mining, fossil fuel extraction and climate change are the main threats, while logging is a relatively modest threat to the remaining intact forest landscapes. Although impacts from indigenous peoples have occurred for thousands of years, these impacts were well integrated with the natural dynamics, including the disturbance dynamics of fire and wind, the relationships of forest types to landscape physiography, natural ecotones between tundra, taiga, temperate forest and steppes, and intact predator-prey systems with large predators and other top-level carnivores still present. Conservation strategies should prevent mining and logging from extending into extant primary forests, and use restoration and close-to-nature forestry in second growth forests so that they provide a buffer zone from more intense human activities. Taiga in the Ural Mountains is very sensitive to climate change because of climate-dependent boundaries with nearby tundra, temperate broadleaf forest, and grassland biomes. A warming climate could lead to replacement of large swaths of the existing taiga by temperate forests and grasslands. Mitigation of climate change by reducing global CO2 emissions would make these climate impacts less extreme.