Scientific publications

The Fennoscandian Green Belt traverses a number of biogeographic borders and is an ideal meridian test site for studying geography and structure of the Eastern Fennoscandia vegetation cover. Administrative borders often turn out to be “large natural boundaries”. The RussianFinnish border is no exception. It occurs not due to the natural phenomena, rather than on account of differences in methodological and theoretical approaches to the investigation and classification of objects. The approaches to latitudinal division of vegetation in Finland differ essentially from those adopted in Russian geobotanical literature. Significant differences in determining latitudinal (subzonal) boundaries are noted. The boundaries of the northern and middle Taiga in Finland are placed considerably further north than those in Russia. According to the Karelian researchers, the southern Taiga is not presented in Karelia, whereas according to the Scandinavian ones, it reaches the Karelian border. The author believes that the northern limit of the southern Taiga should be drawn in the north_west Priladozhje. Finnish colleagues have no conception of zonal association or its substitute. When listing all the forest types found in one or another subzone, they do not mark their place in the ecological sequence. Finnish researches place the southern Taiga in the center of latitudinal sequence, whereas Russian researches consider the middle Taiga to be the most typical, representing all the specific features of the dark coniferous Taiga: high forest stand density, solid green moss continuum, predominance of a few boreal dwarf shrubs, especially, Vaccinium myrtyllus. The author seeks to discuss the focal points, which should be solved at their best through the international collaboration, offered by the Program of the GBF.