Two books, entitled The Nature Preserve Fund of Ukraine and An Ecological Atlas of Ukraine, were published by the Center for Ecological Education and Information Publishing House on the order of the Ministry for Environmental Protection of Ukraine.
The All-Ukrainian Ecology League informed that these two books are the first to provide the wide reading public with systematic information about preserves of national importance, which are the part of Ukraine’s natural preserve fund, and with information about the ecological situation in the country through maps. The natural preserve fund is a phrase that embraces Polissia landscapes, steppes of the Black Sea region, canyons in Podillia, “Saint Mountains” in the Donetsk region, the Dnipro and the Danube bottomlands inhabited by various kinds of birds, virgin forests of the Carpathians, Crimean mountains, river reaches, lakes, waterfalls, the mazes of karst caves, various kinds of plants and animals — everything Ukraine was generously granted by nature, as well as dendrological parks Sofiivka, Oleksandria, Trostianetsky, and Alupkinsky and a collections of botanic gardens carefully put together by several generations.
The book contains information about all the categories of Ukraine’s natural preserves of national importance, lists their location by reference to a nearby settlement, a forestry block, or a landmark natural objects. It also contains articles about newly-made categories of natural preserves, in particular national natural parks. The book contains a total of 616 articles supplemented with bibliography.
The main goal of the Ecological Atlas, whose chief editor Leonid Rudenko of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, is to provide spatial information about the ecological state of nature components and the consequences of the interrelationship between man and nature, which appear to vary in different regions of Ukraine. These books will soon be shipped to the regional offices, schools, and libraries of Ukraine.
