Gugara

Co-directors Andrzej Dybczak and Jacek Naglowski's sobering anthropological documentary Gugara profiles the Evenks, a scarcely-known tribe in the deep heart of Siberia that is not only dying off with alarming rapidity, but quickly losing its culture and fading into social oblivion for that reason. Naglowski and Dybczak travel to the Evenk-populated village of Tutonchany, with a particularly strong emphasis on profiling the Hukachar family (whose son is now employed as a physical education instructor) and another clan where the daughter has become a born-again Christian and the patriarch has withered into a drunken ne'er-do-well. The filmmakers suggest, none too subtly, that the arrival of Christianity and western mass culture (evidenced via the family's TV sets) have each contributed to the decimation of the local culture. The title, when translated, refers to the sound of reindeer bells

Land-cover and Land-use Changes on the Yamal Peninsula

"Land-cover and Land-use Changes on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia" is framed within NASA’s Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program. It contributes to NASA’s global-change observations regarding the consequences of the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the greening of terrestrial vegetation that is occurring in northern latitudes. The work is also part of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI). It addresses the NEESPI science questions regarding the local and hemispheric effects of anthropogenic changes to land use and climate in northern Eurasia.

The overarching goal of the research is to use remote-sensing technologies to examine how the terrain and anthropogenic factors of reindeer herding and resource development, combined with the climate variations on the Yamal Peninsula, affect the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation change and how those changes are in turn affecting traditional herding by indigenous people of the region.

The Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia has undergone extensive anthropogenic disturbance and transformation of vegetation cover over the past 20 years due to gas and oil development and overgrazing by the Nenets reindeer herds. It has been identified as a “hot spot” for both Arctic climate change and land-use change.

In the following posts we will be pleased to spread some remarkable results from these researches.

Gas pipelines in Western Siberia and prices of gas

With the following post, we want to complete the previous information given about gas pipelines in Yamal Peninsula and Western Siberia. In the following link a detailed scheme of gas pipelines in Western Siberia is provided.

A complete report about gas prices in Russia can be obtained via East European Gas Analisys.

EU Project Tundra

We are pleased to present you one of the most relevant projects carried out in the scientific community about environment and climate in the tundra region. The TUNDRA project is supported by the Environment and Climate Programme of the European Commission, Climatology and Natural Hazards.

TUNDRA stands for Tundra Degradation in the Russian Arctic. It is a research project funded for a period of 3 years (1998-2000) by the IVth Framework 'Environment and Climate' Programme of the European Commission. TUNDRA studies the effects of Global Change in the East-European Russian Arctic. The magnitude of expected climatic changes and the fragility of the environment make the Arctic a priority area to study the effects of global change.

The main focus of TUNDRA is to assess feedback processes to the global climate system that originate in the Arctic. Emphasis is given to changes in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere and in freshwater runoff to the Arctic Ocean taking into account Global Warming, industrial pollution and the public perception of environmental degradation. The project is interdisciplinary in nature and involves climatologists, soil scientists, ecologists, palaeoecologists, hydrologists, pollution specialists and social anthropologists from Denmark, Finland, Russia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Tundra project in the web

Siberia’s Arctic landscape is getting greener

Every spring the Arctic bursts into bloom, turning a blinding white landscape green and brown. In recent years some parts of the Arctic have been getting greener, with Northern Alaska showing a 20% increase in summer greenness since 1982. Some blame climate change for the flourishing vegetation, while others believe that disturbances to the land, such as gas-field development and reindeer grazing, could be a partial cause. A new study shows that the answer isn’t simple.

Scientists measure the greenness of a landscape using light-reflection data gathered by weather satellites. Green plants tend to reflect the near infra-red wavelengths, but absorb red wavelengths for photosynthesis. Using near-infrared and red-wavelength data scientists calculate a "normalized difference vegetation index" (NDVI), where higher numbers represent greener landscapes. This measure provides a good reference for year-to-year change of the amount of tundra productivity over the past 25 years.

To better understand the trends in tundra productivity and how this might be related to the dramatic changes in sea ice that are occurring in the Arctic Ocean, Skip Walker from the University of Alaska and his colleagues have studied 25 years' worth of sea-ice data, summer land temperatures and NDVI values from the Yamal Peninsula, in north-west Siberia.

The Yamal region is an ideal place to understand NDVI because it is relatively flat and simple geologically, the vegetation structure is straightforward and it is a hotspot for Arctic land-cover change. What's more, there is a strong north-south climate gradient along which it is possible to study the effects of climate on greenness patterns.

By studying the satellite data the team found that there had been a 7% increase in NDVI over the Yamal Peninsula between 1982 and 2007. Over the same time period the researchers saw a 37% decrease in summer sea-ice concentration around the peninsula, and a 4% rise in summer land temperatures.

Previously Walker and his colleagues had hypothesized that the melting sea ice might be causing a rise in land temperatures and encouraging vegetation to grow but this appeared to be only part of the story on the Yamal peninsula. "The linkages between sea-ice decline, land temperatures and NDVI are not as strong on the Yamal as they are in other areas of the Arctic, which led us to examine other factors such as disturbance,"

Continue in "Environmental research web"

Daily life of tundra nenets

Happy New Year!! After some days of rest, we retake the activity in the blog with an interesting photo documentary of one day in tundra nenets life.

With a population of over 41,000, the Nenets are one of the largest of the indigenous groups in Northern Siberia. Their territory covers a vast area that stretches from the Kanin Peninsula at the White Sea in the west, all the way to the Taymyr Peninsula, a distance of more than 2,000 km. Nowadays most Nenets live in northern areas of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District and the Nenets Autonomous District. The Nenets are comprised of two distinct groups the Tundra Nenets who live in the North, and the Forest Nenets, a much smaller group of around 2,500, who live in the forests to the south.

The Nenets belong to the Samoyed group of peoples. Their ancestors originated in Southern Siberia and are believed to have settled in the Russian North about 1000 years ago. The first written reference to them was made in 1096 in Nestor’s chronicles. Traditionally the Nenets are reindeer breeders, who also hunt, trap and fish. The Nenets who lived in coastal areas also hunted sea mammals but reindeer is the basis of their culture providing food, clothing, shelter (skin tents) and transport.

In the following link you can find the photo gallery and more detailed information about tundra nents.

Photo Gallery

Information