Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2010 number 5

For the purpose of separate zoning with respect to the fauna of amphibia and reptiles, North Eurasia within the boundaries of the USSR in 1990 was divided into 245 regions regarding the vegetation map of nаtural scale 1 : 20 000 000 in such a manner that each of the regions occupied a territory of nаtural sub-zone extending for 10 degrees of longitude. A list of occurring species was made for each region over the ranges of amphibia and reptiles. One the basis of these lists, we calculated Jaccard quotients of similarity; they served as a basis for the cluster analysis of the fauna of distinguished regions. Hierarchic classifications were built according to the results of calculations. For amphibia, 3 herpetofaunistic regions were distinguished; some of them were divided into 4 sub-regions, 7 provinces and 23 districts. For reptiles, the number of regions is larger by 1, the number of sub-regions is almost two times larger, the number of provinces 2.6 and districts is 1.6 times smaller. So, the fractionality of classifications into the number of provinces and districts as a total for reptiles is about 1.5 times higher than for amphibia. Environmental factors correlating with faunistic nonuniformity of the examined territory were revealed. The proposed division provides the information content higher than the previously developed schemes by a factor of 1.9 as a mean for amphibia and by a factor of 3.5 for reptiles and take into account 75 and 91 % of the dispersion of the quotients of similarity of the faunas of specific regions (multiple correlation coefficients: 0.87 and 0.95). A connection with environmental factors and nаtural regimes may explain 84 and 93 % of fauna nonuniformity (correlation coefficients: 0.95 and 0.96).