Cтепи України

May 26, 2010

Ukrainian wildlife comprises nearly 45 thousand species of animals, thousands of plants and algae, hundreds of birds, and millions of insects, amounting to 35% of Europe’s biodiversity on 6% of Europe’s area. However, the biota has been dealt many a crushing blow with agriculture wiping out steppes and even some woodlands, bogs drained, and beasts mercilessly hunted. Human impact endangered many life forms. For some of them that are being herded to the brink of extinction and would require years to recover, human impact literally is the difference between life or death. ‘Ukraine The Young’ has looked into the state of biodiversity in our country. What actions that we undertake harm nature?

Sturgeons – lost; bison – almost lost….

The third edition of the Red Book of Ukraine was published in 2009, having been eagerly awaited for 15 years despite the obligatory decennary update (the second one was released in 1994). Since then, we’ve de facto lost two species of sturgeon and the bison. The latter, as the Deputy Head of the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine, Olexiy Vasyluk, said in the interview to our newspaper, is “being butchered in game reserves”.

In the foreword to the latest version of the Red Book of Ukraine, the need for more precise and complete information on the species’ statuses was stressed upon. Editors mostly blame lack of knowledge on lack of coordination between researchers and the (embryonic) state system of rare species monitoring. Even so, the list is twice as long as its predecessor.

Hydroelectricity destroys birds

The white pelican will soon be a subject of legends and zoos; in the early 1990-s, there were 6 to 11 thousand of them in the world, and now there is even less. The squacco heron dwindles because of water pollution and because of inundation when a powerhouse is built. To see a steppe eagle is already nothing short of a miracle. A century ago the bird had had free reign of Ukrainian steppes, but since then its number has dropped drastically. The last nesting was recorded in the Askania-Nova reserve 30 years ago. Of the Ukrainian population of barn
owl, there are 30 pairs left in toto.

Many of the birds of prey are in immediate danger. For example, according to the data of the Ukrainian Ecological Centre, both the black and the griffon vultures already can’t support themselves without human intervention.

One of largest Ukrainian bumblebees, Bombus fragrans, is also nearly gone. Since the 1950-s, the insect has disappeared from most of Crimea. Today, it inhabits only the Kerch Peninsula. Even there, though, the bees are poisoned by pesticides, their grounds are reduced by tillage,
their nests are ruined by haying.

Even butterflies aren’t spared: the most rare one, Polyommatus boisduvalii, has been seen several times in the last two decades in Polesie and in Luhanska oblast. The fragile creature, included also in the European Red List of Butterflies, can’t survive if woods are replaced with artificial plantations and grass is mowed and burned.

River pollution endangers Potamon tauricum, an endemic semi-terrestrial crab.

The population of the ship sturgeon has been fatally depleted. The fish once swam in the Karkinit Bay of the Black Sea and near the estuaries of Dnieper, Desna and Danube. Another victim is the Atlantic sturgeon. The Ministry of Environmental Protection of Ukraine confirmed that there had been no sightings of either species for several years and that the Mediterranean
monk seal had been considered extinct since the WWII.

The Ministry refers to the stocks of Stizostedion marina as ‘meager’ due to overfishing. So it is with dolphins: in addition to being bycaught in fishing nets, the poor mammals are poached for exhibitions and circuses.

The three hundred of brown bears, a species listed as ‘disappearing’, hide in the mountains in the Zakarpatska and Ivano-Frankivska oblasts.

Once upon a time, there was Steppe…

The majority of our country’s territory belongs to the Steppe and Forest-Steppe Zones. Paradoxically, of steppe there is approximately 1% left. And this 1% is the habitat for dozens of flora and fauna species protected by both national and international environmental laws and conventions. There is no other place where they can live. Among those listed in the RB-3, 159 animals (of the total 542) and 276 plants (of the total 826) depend on steppes for their survival.

‘The gravest threat to the biodiversity today arose from thoughtless afforestation of steppe fragments,’ remarked the Ministry’s spokesman. Why, then, are the unique habitats chosen as planting sites?

According to Vasyluk, dry steppe hills are not, as they are often made out to be, well-suited for growing trees; the foresters are after the territory because there are no conscientious pro-steppe landowners. ‘There have been cases when nature reserves were afforested. Take, for example,
the scandal around Chingul River Plain and other pristine steppes in the Tokmak district of Zaporizka oblast. The infamous case has been investigated for the last four years, with no results,’ said the ecologist.

Most of the national nature parks and reserves of Ukraine concentrate in the Carpathians, Crimea and Polesie. The landscape of steppe is the least preserved one. The overall area of Nature Reserve Fund of Ukraine is less then 5% of the state’s territory; that of a European country, on
average, 12-15%. Still, as we have been reassured by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the portion will grow to 10,4% by 2015, as requested by the State Program of National Ecological Network Formation.

Desna, the one unregulated river

Besides the steppe, Ukraine loses forests and floodplains. ‘There is only one river still unregulated, Desna. It might be the only big river with a natural floodplain in the whole of Europe,’ claimed Vasyluk. ‘Dnieper used to be another one, but now its plain is almost totally
flooded, there are all those reservoirs, and what remains is being demolished in every possible way. In Koncha-Zaspa, for example, by cottage building.’
The ecologists think that preserving the floodplain of Desna is a task as urgent as it had never been before.

To add insult to injury, lately there surfaced another worrying tendency of forest arsons. People then chop the trees up and sell them as firewood. As a result, tens of thousands km of windbreaks protecting fields from desertification are destroyed annually. There is almost nothing to stop the crime. If an arsonist is caught in the act, the worst they face is a fine of 170 hryvnas.

The Shelter

Chornobyl as the Last Resort

The Chornobyl Zone, due to its nearly reserve-like regime, attracts birds and animals like a magnet. Of piscine rarities, there are Acipenser ruthenus, Rutilus frisii, and Barbus barbus borysthenicus. A picture of Coronella austriaca, a snake from the Red Book, was captured there during a special expedition to study reptiles. Birds, of course, are the most numerous group of the refugees: eleven RB-3 species nest here. More than half of them are also listed in the Appendices of the Bern Convention of 1979.

The Future

Rehab for Bats

The biggest problem is that Ukraine, in fact, has no official framework to monitor biodiversity. The Ministry of Environmental Protection is still developing a project of a Protocol for Monitoring National EcoNet. The State Cadaster of Animal Kingdom will continue to accumulate primary data until 2013. The Ministry plans to begin working on seven specific conservation centers for rare and threatened species of plants and animals, a bison nursery, a breeding center for birds of prey, and a rehab center for bats.

(c) Yaryna Gorodyska, umoloda.kiev.ua
Translation by Serenus&Denis