Actual information on virgin, quasi-virgin and natural forests of Ukraine
Cartographic web application for access to actual information on forests of high conservation importance: virgin forests, quasi-virgin forests, natural forests, HCV and others.
Human activity has led to the extinction of most European virgin forests. Remains of intact European forests are mostly located in Northern and Northeastern Europe. However, most of the virgin forests are located in remote parts of the Carpathians, including Ukraine.
WWF-Ukraine and partners have identified almost 100,000 hectares of ancient forests (by law: virgin, quasi-virgin and natural forests) in the Carpathians and Polissya. More than 27 thousand polygons of forest stands have been prepared.
The results of this work are presented in the web GIS “Virgin forests, quasi-virgin forests and natural forests of Ukraine” mirror >>
The purpose of this development is to show in public the spatial distribution of virgin forests in Ukraine. Available bilingual interface (Ukrainian, English).
Different versions of the base map are available (ESRI Topographic, ESRI ShadedRelief, ESRI Imagery, ESRI ImageryClarity, OpenTopoMap).
The user can see the following spatial data:
- Monitoring Places (photos from identification places);
- Virgin, quazi-virgin and natural forests that have received official status (forests that have received official status in the scope of WWF and partners organizations’ projects).
- Forests, that have not received official status (preliminary identified virgin forests etc., which did not receive official confirmation of their status from forest users);
- Forests in the process of official status receiving (preliminary identified forests etc., which are in the process of receiving confirmation about their status);
- Forests without information of their official status (areas of virgin and other forests, preliminary identified by partners organizations, etc., for which information on the current status was not provided).
In a separate layer, you can see the areas identified as virgin, quasi-virgin and natural forests, located within the Protected areas. Also shown are HCV – valuable forests that need proper management in order to preserve them, selected under FSC certification. In addition, the map presents Representative Sample Areas (areas delineated to conserve or restore viable examples of an ecosystem that would naturally occur in that geographical region), locations of rare species. There are layers of other categories of forests, such as managed forests, recreational parts of cities green belts, forest zones around sanatoriums, anti-erosion forests, forests along rivers and around lakes, watercourses etc.
Compartments are marked separately, the area of which should be changed in the next forest inventory, and compartments, only a part of which received official status as sub-compartments, which should be displayed during the next forest inventory.
The cadastral division according to the State Land Cadastre is presented.
As the map approaches, large clusters of points break up into smaller ones and then into individual points. You can see a photo for each monitoring point.
Attribute information is available for forest plots of different status – forest management data.
Attribute information is also available for rare species locations.
The application is implemented on the stack of the following technologies:
backend: Geoserver, Apache, Tomcat;
frontend: Leaflet, jQuery, Bootstrap.
The data are published according to the protocols OGC: WMS Ń– WFS.