Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and natural resources 2016 number 5S

Based on long-term investigations, we compiled the soil and soil degradation maps for the central ecological zone of the Baikal natural territory (CEZ BNT). It was found that the soil cover has, in addition to the general facies and provincial peculiarities, a clearly pronounced beltedness, because most of the study territory is occupied by mountain ridges, and only a small part of it corresponds to a narrow lowland belt of the Lake Baikal shores, and to the river valleys. It is shown that the northern and northeastern parts of the CEZ BNT are characterized by a predominance (in automorphic conditions) of podzols and podburs with a weakly differentiated profile. The map displays a widespread occurrence of soddy podzolic soils on the southwestern and eastern shores of Baikal, both on the plain and in the foothill belt. The eastern macroslope of the Primorskii Ridge, immediately adjacent to Baikal, is distinguished by its steepness, and by an abundance of rocky cliffs. Podzols and podzolized burozems are of widespread occurrence on the southern coast of Lake Baikal, on the bedrock slope under dark-coniferous and grass aspen-birch forests with the undergrowth of dark-coniferous species. It is determined that carbo-lithozems of dark-humus and grey- and dark-humus soils tend to occur to the outcrops of marbles and their derivatives. It is established that the distinctive nature of the ecological conditions for soil formation in landscapes within the Lake Baikal drainage basin is responsible for the uniqueness and specificity of soils, and this may be exemplified by formation of coarse-humus burozems in conditions of Siberia, which is not typical for this region according to the general classification of soils of Russia.